The Wedding of Philip
Dermon
Part II
(Zhenitba Philipa Philipovicha Dermona)
Editor’s Note: This amusing tale of a wedding had
to be interrupted due to the disappearance of a page from the copy of a manuscript
which came into the Editor’s possession, when, on a recent trip to Egypt, he
became acquainted with the manuscript’s owner, one Sinuhe Osip Soueif, and
subsequently purchased from him said story in manuscript form – minus,
apparently, the missing page. Moreover,
due to the sudden unexplained disappearance from Egypt of Sinuhe Soueif himself,
the Editor was placed in a position of considerable uncertainty, not to say
discomfort, concerning the retrieval of the missing page – or indeed pages. For
all the Editor knew was that he had apprehended a gap in the story which could not
be explained by any artistic decision of its author, Nikolai Gogol, even
bearing in mind the painful vicissitudes affecting our author in the final days
of his life, when the story was almost certainly written, nor could this gap
have been due to translators’ errors.
Happily, these missing pages (for I am informed that
there is more than one) are soon to be restored to us, just as the mysteriously
missing Sinuhe shall be restored to his native Egypt. How the repatriation of
Sinuhe shall come about, and why he went missing in the first place, is another
story, one with which the Editor does not want to distract the reader–and,
truth to tell, this story of Sinuhe’s return still awaits the event, that is
the actual return, on which it is to be based––so now let us take this
opportunity to resume reading Gogol’s fine description of a wedding feast, somewhat modified, it may be, by his translators.
But enough of editorial comments! Let us resume….
The Wedding of Philip
Dermon, Part II
By
Nikolai Gogol
Translated from the Russian by * Pavel Mikhailovich Manilov * and
* Naguib Fyodor
Soueif *
The Wedding of Philip Dermon
Part II
But it seems that here the author has leapt a little way
ahead of the story, for none of these distinctive culinary delights were even
to be sampled by the wedding guests until after the ceremony proper, and in any
case, the variety of edibles that we have described above, in no way surpassed
the infinite variety of human types, humane for the most part as they were, if
not straightforwardly humanists or outright humanitarians, for the folks in the
district don’t hold with excessive learning or showy philanthropy –– though
heaven knows, they all do their due diligence at the church bazaar and bake sale–– but yes, a great variety of
human types was on display among the company of men and women who attended this
memorable occasion.
The wedding guests were first glimpsed by
Philip in the chapel (not plain and simple, but not gaudily bedecked with papish
pictures either), where it seemed that he had been immediately transported “on
the wings of love,” as the saying goes, from the ebullient crush at the
florist’s shop. The crowd in the chapel –– the congregation –– appeared to
Philip as an expanded version, and at the same time an embellished version, of
the congregated celebrants at the florist’s shop, they who had clinked
champagne flutes and toasted his success only hours before; and indeed for
Philip, a mere nothing, a hollow emptiness inside of which memory swoons,
existed between those two pinnacles of the day.
In the chapel then, standing up in his
whitest of white shirts, so clean it gently wafted a slight soapy scent, and
his well-fitting jacket with satin lapels, and his impeccably creased black
pants, which just brushed the shiny tops of his patent leather shoes; standing
there rather resplendent before the congregants, with the tall, boldly sounding
organ at his back, Philip, whose only obligation was to wait there, had time to
take note of certain individuals outstanding among the sea –– or perhaps large,
imponderable pond –– of faces: a pond indeed rippling all over its merry
surface, rustled and ruffled by the quickening breezes of curiosity and
anticipation. And whose freshly washed, upturned faces did Philip see before
him?
Tony the barber he saw at once, sitting in a
second-row pew and wearing a new charcoal grey suit and brightly colored,
magenta tie. Tony sported a brand new haircut which appeared to have been
self-administered, and as he gazed, it seemed, through slightly filmy eyes,
towards the front of the church, the barber continually patted a wayward wisp
of hair that refused to stay in place. Near the back of the church, Philip
could see both Mayor Monkfish and Dr. Clammyman, both of them dressed with
extreme propriety, and even propinquity, appearing as they did to be wearing,
each in his own inimitable way, the same suit, one that, or rather two that,
had likely come right off the sales rack at the Tall Men’s Store. And Philip
was delighted to see that these two unambiguous verticals in a roomful of
slopes and slants (for many are the ways of pre-testing a posture for a session
of clerical listening) sitting up straight (for how else would a small-town
mayor and a country doctor be expected to pose on an oaken bench?) both pillars
of the community, were quite literally puffing out their chests, so brimming
were they with pride and admiration for Philip and his imminent bride.
The mother of the groom, dressed tastefully
in an understated gold satin frock with black velvet trim, was seated in the
front row of the church, but to her son she appeared to be continually receding
as her lacquered helmet-style coiffure bobbed, swayed and dipped amidst row
after row of similarly styled female heads. Along with this glimpse of his
splendidly bedecked mother, the faces of Tony the barber, Dr. Clammyman, and
even the mayor began to recede into the throng of well-turned-out guests, and
Philip felt himself borne aloft, beyond their newly-anonymous presence––as
though in his triumph he was sailing above the air itself, and into vast
regions of pure ether.
As he went sailing through these regions of
pure ether, however, Philip caught sight of the large, ponderous face of Mr.
Simonson (some would call it a beefy face, “beefy” being a kind of cross
between bovine and bullish). In a trice this meaty imago of the influential Mr. S. prompted Philip to return to terra firma for a better look. And this
is what he saw:
The gentleman was dressed in a dark suit like
all of the other men, but, probably because he was Mr. Simonson and no one
else, his “customary and usual” attire seemed exceptionally fine. And Simonson
(for I think we can dispense now with that title which is no title – certainly
not the type of title to which Simonson would indubitably have been entitled,
had he not been living in a truly democratic society), yes, Simonson simply
glowed, surrounded as he was with what amounted to an aura of golden
respectability and – there is no other word for it – power. Simonson was what
they call a larger than life fellow. His head and shoulders were literally
large, and his proud torso seemed to be invested with a golden glow of timeless
contentment.
To Philip the man looked at least a head
taller than everyone else in the room, though in actuality he was the same
height, if not fractionally shorter, than the other men. A few of the ladies
were even as tall as Mr. Simonson (there I go with that “Mr.”) but that likely
had to do with ladies’ hats. Indeed, as that is not the impression Simonson
conveyed, it is probably not necessary to mention it. In the buttonhole of the
Simonson
suit coat radiated a blood-red boutonnière,
Simonson being the only man in the audience who had troubled to wear such a flower,
and the vibrant red of his carnation blended with his golden aura to produce
such an elegant vision of a man, that it can only be compared with a certain
Russian champagne called Ay. The effect of this small bright flower upon Philip
Dermon may be described as hypnotic and inebriating at the same time, and so
great was the levity that filled his heart –– as though he had just taken
several greedy gulps of nitrous oxide –– that to try to put it into words would
be sheer travesty.
On the other hand one must not cleave to the
impression that Philip’s self-surpassing sense of satisfaction, or even his
observation of the company in the chapel, lasted for more than a few moments.
All of these impressions, some mundane, some fanciful, flashed before him in a
trice, while the organ was playing that familiar and always lovely prelude that
signals the beginning of the ceremony. This prelude ushered in some
non-descript groomsmen and five willowy bridesmaids dressed in long dresses of
a color that was at the same time bright and deep.
To Philip they appeared as five lovely red
flowers moving towards him in a row, unfolding and blossoming before his
astonished eyes. They seemed as though they were inviting him with their
perpetually uncurling petals, to pluck them and wear them, all five together,
in the buttonhole of his suit coat, as some kind of maximum boutonnière. He had
only to reach out and grasp them! and Philip, enchanted, was on the verge of doing
just that. But fortunately Philip remembered himself just in time and quelled
the whimsical impulse. His hands at his sides, he glanced instead at Simonson.
The “Oh!”s and “Ah!”s of the
women throughout the church alerted Philip to the fact that his bride had
entered the chapel, and with a solemn and dutiful expression that is very
touching to see on the upturned face of such a young man, he raised his eyes
towards Felice. She entered like a cloud, like a white fleece, and for what
seemed a full minute Philip squinted and gaped, but try as he might, he could
not penetrate those veritable veils of Maya in which she was so delicately wrapped;
he could not penetrate those veils, that is, well enough to be able to discern
her face.
It must be remarked that this inability to
detect any particularity of form or feature in his intended caused our young
man considerable distress, reminding him, as it did, of his failed attempt to
visualize her earlier in the day. Glancing for reassurance, as he often did, at
his mother, Philip noted that her face bore an expression of ambivalence: pleasure
in the occasion was there, to be sure, but there was also a something else: an
odd subrosa expression, as it were, of bewilderment and consternation. This
caused Philip a further pang, but then catching sight of Simonson’s benign look
of approval, and even admiration, the bridegroom was once more content.
Whether he could divine her features or not,
Felice was surely the most beautiful bride that ever existed. That much was
evident from the sighs of the ladies and the nods of the men in the pews. And
basking in the assurance (assurance, you see, is not hard to come by in the
Land of Insurance) –– in the assurance, then, that his bride was nothing if not
beautiful, Philip contented himself for the moment with a cloud-like vision of
her that morphed, as she approached, from cumulus to cirrus, becoming wispier, more
uncertain, and more insubstantial, with every passing moment.
Just then a terrible thing happened. A
catastrophe!
Editor’s Note:
I am sorry to have to interrupt your reading at this precise juncture of
the story, leaving you in suspense, but it is just at this point that I
detected –– rather cleverly, if I do say so myself, that gap in the story that
set me on the path of apprehending the missing pages ––soon to be restored––first,
however, necessitating my efforts at following the traces of the recently
vanished, and apparently expatriated, previous owner of the story in manuscript
form, a seventy-five year-old Egyptian gentleman named Sinuhe Soueif. And it
turned out, as I discovered through assiduous questioning of several of
Sinuhe’s children, and especially nephews and nieces and grandchildren –– for
it was they who quickly texted me back on their cell phones, and they whom I
had been best able to locate through the offices of my Egyptian host – (he who
opened the door for me to the strange, transformational world of Gogoliana in
which I now found myself immersed) it turned out that this was not the first
time Sinuhe had disappeared. Indeed, I received valuable intel from Sinuhe’s
niece Basma, a teen-ager dressed in couture, including the headscarf, who
peered at me from behind a pair of sunglasses, and burst into fits of giggles
from time to time, when I saw her with her girlfriend at the home of my host. But
she was a bright kid who knew her English, and this is what she wrote:
Dear Mr. Trey, Robert Hollingworth,
I know not if you will remember, that we met in the courtyard
when I came in through the low archway covered by the vine with red grapes
growing ripe. On that dark night the red of the grapes was invisible. I came in
on the arm of Sinuhe, my “Old Uncle”, who guides me now that the ankle it is
sprained that one, and so I do not follow at four paces, but enter grand as any
European lady before the feminist uprising. And just then you come in, with
your camera, to visit Mr. Gamal! And I laughed out! But you, kind sir, will
forgive my laughing at you when you learn that never before did I, Basma
Soueif, see so tall of a man, also skinny, come under a low arch, and when he
ducks his straw-colored head, and crouches the shoulders, I think so of the
English story Alice, where she grows too big for the house. Also the camera is
very big. Like we say in the only-English chat rooms, it is “ginormous”, and
forgive me mentioning, you were clumsy carrying that camera. “Too heavy for
him!” I think. Then after the dinner you go, and your host Mr.Gamal’s
granddaughter, Isis, tells me you have taken no pictures of us anyway, at this
time. Maybe it is that you have taken already enough footage pictures for your
film, “Making Democracy”. Simply I do not know, and Isis does not, and Mr.
Gamal, a scholar, even lacks this knowledge: why do you come to us, to Egypt,
looking for democracy, when already you have so much democracy in your own
land? Or so you are very fond of telling us.
So I am Basma, youngest daughter of Naguib, Sinuhe’s brother
(in fact I am sixteen years), and I write you this letter to answer your
questions, to answer all if I can, and it will all be in a letter, because the
explanations are longer than I can write with my thumbs on the little Android
in the text sentences. But even though that dark night I arrive on Sinuhe’s arm
and you squeeze into the house like Alice, spindly but too tall, and then I
laugh out! and we are introduced by Old Uncle, still I wonder, will you
remember me? For I, my sisters and my girl cousins, and Isis, named for the
great Egyptian goddess, and her sisters too – we all wear the headscarf,
preferably Hermès,
and we hear anyway that we all look alike to you, because one cannot say of us:
“She is redhead and her cousin a blonde, and her auntie brunette”, so you
cannot tell us apart the one from the other. So then Isis is the pretty one you
saw standing there in the courtyard, Mr. Gamal’s granddaughter, but I have the
blue eyes of my Russian grandmother.
But it is Sinuhe you have asked and asked about –– because a page is missing from our
family’s Russian short story, our Gogol story, that Sinuhe sold you, I am
thinking, “for a mess of potage”. Where
did the uncle go? You are rightly wondering. And I must warn you, my uncle has
disappeared before. More than once! Why do people disappear like that? May it
be that when you know his story, you will be able to answer that question.
Today we children call Sinuhe “Old Uncle”, and he likes to sit
long over dinner and talk and talk. When he was a young man, Sinuhe liked to
fight. If he wasn’t actually fighting someone, he was preparing to fight. And
whom was he preparing to fight? The British, of course! They who “held us in
thrall” to control the price of cotton and oil. He taught us children to call
their country “Perfide Albion” for
their double-dealing, he said. But that was long after he fought in the uprising.
Sinuhe was born in 1938, so when Nasser took over Suez, our canal, and the
British and the French and the Israelis got angry and invaded our land, Sinuhe
was a young man then, and ripe for fighting. But our grandmother Amina Bella
didn’t believe in fighting, and especially did she not favor fighting the
English, for the simple reason that, just like her mother Bella before her,
Amina Bella was a great student of the English literature.
Why did Sinuhe disappear? That time, he was given a rifle, and
though Amina forbade any of her boys to bring home one of the guns that were
being handed out all over Cairo, Sinuhe took a gun and hid it, and in a way
unknown to Amina Bella, he joined the other Egyptian men who lay on their
bellies in the heat of the sun, who lay down, stretched out in a long row
behind the sandbags, and aimed and fired at the government’s targets. And when
the Tripartite Aggression began, Sinuhe disappeared from home and did not come
back.
Why do people disappear? Are there many reasons, or is there
only one? Years later, after his adventures in Algeria and in other, secret
places in Africa and the Middle East, and, after convincing Egypt to welcome
him back home again, Sinuhe told us children how like an enchantment it was:
the decision to leave his country. “It was like a dream,” he said, and many
more things of that kind.
Was Sinuhe, a grown man, afraid of his mother, Amina? Is that
why he left home? Did he simply panic and flee, first his home, then his
country? For though he refused to talk about it, and still does, we who call
him “Old Uncle” suspect that he went to the airfield with the Egyptian
volunteers, and shot at the invaders as they parachuted from their planes.
You want to know, of course, where he went this time. That
knowledge I cannot give to you, at least not yet. But know that whenever Sinuhe
has gone missing – and, the truth? It has happened several times – whenever he
has gone away, suddenly, leaving no explanation – on those occasions he has
always come back.
So do not despair: Sinuhe will be found, and your missing page
– or pages – will be found! All in the fullness of time!
Most Sincerely,
Basma Natalia Soueif
But I fear I
may have distracted you with this young person’s prattle (“mess of potage”,
indeed – as though Sinuhe had sold me his birthright!) So let us return to our
Gogolian cliffhanger:
Story
Continued. Just then, a terrible thing happened. A
catastrophe! A thing so shocking and appalling that quite literally no one – that is to say not a single soul, including
the assembled salespeople, who tend to be more well-traveled, though honestly? in
the present case, that means well-traveled within the state – no one, in short,
had ever beheld the like. (Or we might say more accurately, that no one had
ever not beheld the like: and you
will see exactly what I mean by that in just one moment.)
Know then, that at the precise moment when the bride was
anticipated to arrive at the altar –– and Felice, being sui generis, or without parentage, was walking, or rather wafting,
down the aisle “on the wings of love,” though not on another’s arm –– anticipated
to arrive, that is, to join her expectant betrothed –– at that precise moment,
when every well-coifed head in the church (and a few that were not so well-coifed)
was turned upon Philip, Felice, instead of bravely stepping forth to join our
eager, if somewhat befuddled, young man on the stage in the scene enacting the
start of a new life, Felice, instead of
manifesting herself at long last ––instantly
and completely disappeared.
What an uproar! What horrendous confusion! For it was obvious
from the rapidity of her disappearance that Felice had not simply walked or
even run out of the church. No, the aisle was long and the doors behind the
pulpit were locked, as everyone knew. So there was nothing at all to say,
except that she had temporarily negated her presence, dematerialized her essence,
transcended mere being and morphed into non-being, or, to state the case more
plainly, it was just as though she had temporarily hidden herself away in a
magician’s cupboard, like the lady in a vanishing act.
It was as though Felice, ever cloudlike, her paler than pale
striations now attenuated to the point of invisibility, now dispersed across a
blue but infinitely pallid sky, simply dwelt betimes elsewhere. It was as though she was, for the nonce, that is, merely temporarily, in absentia because, after all, what bride would miss her own
wedding?
So in the midst of all of the tumult, it was somehow decided
that Felice had really intended to be there but for some reason was not, and,
in view of the cages of doves and the tables of food and of all the
preparations, it was unanimously decided to substitute the first red girl in
Felice’s place and to continue with the ceremony as if nothing had happened.
The first girl in red consented to perform the substitution, and Philip’s
mother, whose mental swoon had lasted a full three minutes, surged bravely from
the depths, swam to the surface of a chaotically choppy sea of oscillating
sensations, and stumbling at last upon the shore of sanity, floundering only
momentarily before filling her lungs with the good, clean air of common sense
–– Philip’s mother wholeheartedly agreed that it would be the best thing, to
use a proxy for the missing inamorata,
and to carry on as though nothing, or no one, were amiss.
As if to seal the deal, Mr. Simonson approved the new
arrangements with a nod of the head, and in a matter of seconds the ceremony
had been performed.
Editor’s Note:
I am sorry to interrupt your reading once again, especially as the
little society painted by Gogol has just begun to “adjust” to the harrowing
disappearance of what, for lack of a better term, we shall call our heroine.
But I have just received another missive from the teen-ager Basma, informing me
of the return of Sinuhe, and other matters germane to the very text you are
reading. Basma writes:
Dear Mr. Trey
Holling, Robert,
This is
Basma, your faithful correspondent, writing to you in the Paul Revere Township,
named for a hero of your American Revolution. Like Egypt, as you say, the
American Colonies had a problem with the British, but you must admit that all
else is very different for our two countries, maybe even they are opposite.
I thank you kindly
for your very long letter explaining me the democracy. It is really like I have
an old fashion American pen pal. “Retro”, as we say in the chat. But before you
take me to school, Mr. Trey, you must study up more the Egyptian history – not
the pyramids this time, but the modern. For I think as long as I try to explain
you the Tripartite Aggression, and you answer me with long paragraphs about the
President Jackson and “muddy boots”, it is certain that we will not understand
one another.
I am sorry to
hear that your project, the docudrama “Making of Democracy” got dumped by the
studio. But as we say, ripeness is all. And maybe for the best. Some future
time, when you have learned our modern history and our language (not the
hieroglyphics this time, the Arabic), maybe then you will come back to us and
we can talk again about the democracy, and the politics, drink the black coffee
too, and nibble on those Egyptian sweets you so much liked. And then it may be that
you can make the docudrama, and it will be better than what you make the first
time. But until you will learn as much about us, as we have learned about you,
we will not understand one another. So let us stop talking about democracy for
the time being, and let us talk about something we can both understand, and be
“on the same page”, as you used to say. And this something is our Gogol story.
So as I am
telling you in the text message, Sinuhe is returned to Egypt. No explanation
this time, of where he has been, only when he comes back, he bows down and
kisses the earth, so glad is he to be home, and he says, “Sinuhe is a Delta
man.”
When Sinuhe
calms down, he tells me his message for you. And he gives to me a few extra
sheets of paper that belong to the Gogol story, only they aren’t the missing
pages you were looking for, for the simple reason that those missing pages
never existed. Sinuhe says to tell you that you were mistaken about that gap in
the story, that is just the way Gogol writes: sometimes he flies us very fast
from one scene to the next, as on a magic carpet, far above the earth, and in
just that way the author takes us from the florist’s shop to the wedding
ceremony.
The sheets of
paper enclosed here are not those missing pages that never were, but something
of a gift from my fsther Naguib. For during the time Sinuhe was gone, my father
made a confession, and this confession he wants you to hear. And my father
says, that all those years ago, after he studied English in
Australia,
and came back and wrote the new translation, my father tells me to tell you,
and hopes he committed no crime, but in truth he changed the end of Gogol’s
story – only the last few pages – to an ending he personally preferred.
An
irretrievable act of arrogance! You may be thinking. But it is not
irretrievable! For now the truth comes out! All these years, it seems, my
father kept hidden the copy of the first English translation, the not very good
translation, handwritten in ink that is by now quite faded, on yellowed paper!
And of the last two pages, the 1852 translation of the ORIGINAL ENDING, my
father has made a Xerox copy, and this he is most kindly sending to you.
But he begs
your forbearance regarding his decision not to send you the rest of the 1852
translation, or even a Xerox copy
of it, for
the simple reason that it is not written as well as his own version.
Sincerely,
Basma
Natalia Soueif
To Be Continued
No comments:
Post a Comment