Hero^[3]

They decided to call the baby Hero. Such an unusual name showed the despairing ambition of the parents, who used the birth of a son as a generally accepted pretext for giving up on their own lives and transferring all of their unfulfilled hope to the child. When Hero was old enough to understand the meaning of his name, he began to feel that people constantly expected him to provide some justification of this meaning. And since he provided no justification, the name elicited laughter at first and then derision.

At school, for instance, he tried to distinguish himself in gymnastics classes, but neither strength nor agility was in his movements, and after the last in a sequence of failed exercises the instructor’s voice often thundered: “You there, Hero!” In an attempt to elude ridicule, Hero called himself Harold among his peers. But they soon found out somehow or other that he was not Harold but Hero.

The older he grew the more hopelessly convinced he became that he could not fulfill the obligations imposed on him by his name; and by the time he entered technical college to become an engineer he was a stoop-shouldered young man with a stomach ulcer. Although he considered himself a writer and wrote poetry instead of taking notes at lectures, here again he was deficient in that heroism which in art is called “talent.” In his love life also something essential was lacking, and since women guessing this, paid him no particular attention, he developed in himself what is known as a lofty attitude, which allowed him to avoid taking any sort of initiative.

One day the customary exchange of amorous experience was taking place in Hero’s peer group, and each boy discussed in detail the sensations felt and exhibited by his partners in love. Following the end of one lurid story, everyone turned to Hero, since it was his turn to talk. With a disdainful expression on his face Hero recited the following:

 
“Better drink gallons of gin and lavoris
then loll with you tongue on a stinking clitoris.”
 

Under cover of the general laughter, someone countered this poetic extemporization with remark, “We know that you couldn’t perform either of these heroic feats.” And in fact Hero never drank hard liquor, for fear of irritation his ulcer.

He very much enjoyed walking in solitude through the city, admiring unusual buildings and marveling at the interesting thoughts that came into his head. However, when he returned and sat down at the table to write them down, Hero would suddenly discover that all his thoughts were forgotten beyond recall, and he began to think that perhaps he had only imagined them.

On finishing technical college, he married for love. His sweetheart agreed to marry him reluctantly. She had never had a proposal, and her mother was nudging her onto the main traveled road of matrimony – it’s high time, she said – and, for that matter, the girl herself was tired of waiting and afraid to let an opportunity slip by. And Hero was obviously in love.

And so they were married. At the wedding the new bride already held the reins of government and handed out orders to Hero; but still, these were uttered in a soft and tender voice and sounded to the guests, who found everything touching, like billing and cooing. The bride had had Hero grow out his beard for the wedding ceremony – she had always liked a strong willed chin, and Hero had no chin at all. At the wife’s behest they danced, something which Hero never permitted himself, due to his lack of any sense of rhythm. He shifted from leg to leg, a weak, good natured smile shone through his thick beard, and his wife looked at his happy eyes and thought cheerfully: “You know, he’s really not so bad.”

After a year a son was born to them, and the wife bestowed on him all her feelings of affection, something which Hero was unable to evoke in her. Thus only contemptuous indifference remained for his portion. Hero also began to feel indifference, discovering with amazement that his love had irretrievably fled. In his student days, while pontificating on love, he had asserted that one must sever relations immediately upon the vanishing of love, and hurl oneself right away into the search for a new one. However, now, looking at his chile, toward whom he also felt no love and in whom he saw only a new lifelong responsibility, Hero discovered reality for himself, and likewise his own helplessness in it.

Once after a particularly noisy fight with his wife he went away to his mother’s and spent the night there. The thought of divorce awoke horror in him, since he saw in divorce not freedom but the necessity for the actions and efforts required for this procedure. Besides, he had a dread of solitude, to which he had simply grown unaccustomed. Hence after work he returned home as if nothing had happened. His wife cursed him out, which even had become a melancholy norm in their relationship, and Hero pretended to ignore her. He comforted himself with the idea that he gave in to her on trifles, but in serious matters held his own. In the depths of his soul he knew this for a lie, and so felt bitter, cast out into the street to wander around with his son.

He remembered the time just after his wedding, when the long kisses of his wife had awakened him mornings. At that time she had been subject to morning passion, and she used to wake up earlier than Hero. He would feel her hungry mouth, redolent of recently applied toothpaste. For his part, he tried not to open his mouth and only stuck his tongue out between clenched teeth, while she traveled over him, he still half asleep. After a couple of months she gave up brushing her teeth before starting to kiss him in the morning, and he no longer bothered to hide his smell; and so by the end of the first year, they had completely forgotten how to be ashamed in front of each other and were able to release gas audibly in bed, which became a place of slumber rather than of love.

Gradually Hero exhausted all interest in his wife’s body, and she no longer woke earlier than he in the mornings. Often, with burning cold in his heart, he would look at her wan sleeping face with imperfectly washed-off makeup on its eyes and was horrified at the strangeness of this person. During sleep his wife would lay her hand on the pillow beside her head; and her thumbnail, which she chewed constantly, nauseated him. During her menstrual period, which in his wife lasted a depressingly long time, Hero always felt a burning shame among friends or in a public place – it seemed to him that everyone was aware of the stench emanation form his wife, so strong that she could not hide it by any means, or, what was likelier, didn’t even try.

When a little drunk in the company of friends, Hero’s wife liked to allude transparently to his sexual indifference toward her. The friends would understand and titter, and he would condescendingly smile as if the conversation were about something else. At such moments he had a great desire to take a lover, but somehow the occasion never arose, and he forgot again about his desires.

Hero often put the question to himself of whether or not his wife was deceiving him, and after analyzing her behavior he could arrive at the desired answer – “No.” This question raised itself again and again, and finally Hero stopped trying to find the answer, and merely regarded the question with a sidelong look, until his energy for questioning ran dry out of indifference to the identity of her lover.

The only thing which shakily bound him to his wife was his son, but he had grown into a malicious beast, and Hero was unable to approach him.

Hero considered himself a talented poet, but he had no time for work in which he might show off his powers. His everyday business obligations amounted to mere hackwork, in which he was either unable or unwilling to find a place for creativity. Goaded by the constant reproaches of his wife concerning his meager salary, from time to time he pretended that he was looking for an additional job. But whenever any such opportunity materialized, he did his best to ensure that it remained unused.

Hero painstakingly conserved his free time. He partitioned it into time for books, time for movies, time for television. He was always glad of a chance to talk about something he had seen or read, but in his speech there were neither color nor subtlety; and only from the fact that he usually noticed individual felicitous details would it have been possible to guess that unexpressed depths lay in his soul. Hero’s fondest dream was to shoot film; before his eyes stood technicians, who jolted the audience with his and their significance and well-wrought work. Perhaps it goes without saying that Hero made not the slightest effort to realize his dream.

Thus life went on.

Even in childhood he had experienced immense internal revulsion at waking up in the morning when the alarm clock rang or his mother shook him by the shoulder. It was necessary to turn on the radio loudly, shout in his ear, douse him with cold water, to get him out of bed. When he was a little older he trained himself to overcome his hostility toward forced waking and to get up right away when the alarm clock started to ring, but still he continued to think about this hostility. His thinking arrived, for the time being, at no conclusions, but the effort of thinking used up all the energy which was roused every morning after the hated awakening. He ironically referred to himself as the “Sleeping Ugly,” remembering the time when the morning kissed of his wife had made his awakening happy. Even on his days off Hero did not manage to wake up of his own accord – either his son would be making noise, or his wife would be clattering around in the kitchen, or else she could simply wake him, irritatingly reminding him that he had to do some household chore or other.

He experienced the greatest satisfaction in life from waking up naturally, in the first moments, when there is no memory yet, and everything in front of you is unrecognizable, and only after several seconds you remember where your are, and who you are, and what sort of life you have. This sensation was especially beautiful in summer, when tree branches moved by the wind would peep in at the window, and the sun’s rays, shining through the leaves, were transmuted on the wall into muddy wavering shadows which mingled with the botanical drawings of the old wallpaper. Behind the window birds could be heard talking and vying with one another. Sometimes a loud dung beetle would fly in, and would fly around the room in a frenzy until, finally, if flew out the window, leaving behind it the silence of awakening. Thoughts at such a time were characterized be a great mobility, which more than compensated for their lack of depth. In the body a state of peace and joy fluttered like a flag, as if one were happily returning home after a long journey.

Hero had not experienced this state for a long time and sharply yearned for it every time he found himself unceremoniously awakened by the life which it was his fate to live. And the sharper this yearning became the more Hero thought about its essence.

No other single outrage against human nature is so widespread, and therefore can be perceived as so natural, as awakening by force. Hundreds of millions of people are awakened by the bell of an alarm clock, by a trumpet signal, by a cry or a blow. And sleep – thought Hero – is the quintessence of such spiritual life as is possible in a material world. The body continues to perform the minimum of necessary physiological functions, to remain as an unburned bridge between that world to which the soul is sent, and this world. But the nocturnal travels of the soul, with their unknown but extremely important purpose, are offhandedly interrupted under any plausible pretext.

Daily work, loathed by the majority of people, is considered the most publicly acceptable pretext, and consequently the most natural one for forced awakening. People masochistically set the alarm for the time allotted to sleep or else ask someone to wake them up. What is more, on awakening they will put their bodies under cold water, set them in motion – in other words, do everything possible to drive out sleep from their bodies. In this way people live as willing slaves, who for their obedience and self-control are called “free.” Thus thinking, Hero dreamed of rebellion.

Sometimes he imagined that by the force of his young life his son would be able to lead him out to some new dimensions of being. And he clumsily tried to establish contact with his son by taking charge of his upbringing. But if Hero refused him something in a threatening voice, the son would run to his mother and get what he wanted either right away or after a tantrum, which would stop the moment he got what he demanded. Throughout the process of his son’s howling, the wife would scream that she would kill him, enumerating dastardly methods, such as “I’ll cut off your head!” – but soon she would relent and kiss him with a passion that had found no better use. If Hero became indignant that his wife was permitting his son what he had just forbidden, his wife would hurl her always copious irritation at him, calling him a “swine,” a “blank,” a “nothing,” or sometimes something altogether different, depending on what seemed to her at a given moment to be the most insulting. The son, clinging to his mother’s skirt, would stare triumphantly at his father. Hero, eyes flashing, walked off into his room with the despairing conviction in his heart that someday he would find a way out of this situation by some extraordinary method not requiring the strength for divorce and the start of a new life.