© Берестова А. И., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2023

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2023

* * *

JUST THIS SIDE OF BYZANTIUM^[1]
An introduction

I must say that this book was a surprise. The nature of such surprises is that you begin your work around any word, or series of words that happens along in your head instead of trying to develop a made up idea. I call it a word-association process.

Thank God, I found this method quite early in my writing career. I would simply get out of bed each morning, walk to my desk, and put down some word. Then associations with that word would show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my surprise, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely.

So, first I searched my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night from my childhood, and made stories from these.

Then I looked back at the green apple trees and the old house of my parents, and the house next door where my grandparents lived, and all the lawns of my childhood summers, and I began to try words for all that.

So in this book you have a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully appropriate. I was gathering images and impressions all of my life, and forgetting them. Words (like, for instance, dandelion wine) were catalysts that sent me back and opened the memories out, and helped me see what those memories had to offer.

From the age of twenty-four to thirty-six, it was my nearly every day game: to walk myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass in order to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves or about picking wild grapes with my father and brother, and, perhaps, remember a fragment of a letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his sorrows.

I also wanted to see the ravine, especially on those nights when walking home late after seeing The Phantom of the Opera, my brother Skip would run ahead and hide under the ravine-creek bridge like the Lonely One and jump out and seize me, yelling, so that I ran, fell, and ran again, babbling all the way home. That was great stuff.

Through word-association in my game I came upon old and true friendships. I borrowed my friend John Huff from my childhood in Arizona and shipped him East to Green Town so that I could say good-bye to him properly.

In my recollections, I sat me down to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with the long dead and much loved, for I was a boy who did indeed love his parents and grandparents and his brother, even when that brother “dumped” him.

Or I found myself on the front porch Independence night helping my Uncle Bion fire his home-made brass cannon.

When I learned to go back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is just the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the emerald-green grass of other Augusts while starting to grow up, grow old, and feel darkness waiting under the trees to spill the blood.

A critical article analyzing Dandelion Wine amused and somewhat surprised me a few years ago. The author wrote about the ugliness of the harbor and how depressing the coal docks and railroad-yards were down below the town of Waukegan (which I named Green Town in my novel), and wondered why I, who had been born and grown up there, hadn’t noticed all that.

Naturally, I had noticed them but, being a genetic magician, I was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Counting box-cars is a usual activity of boys. Their elders get annoyed at the train that blocks their way, but boys happily stand and count, and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places.

As to that so-called ugly railroad-yard, it was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants that washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning.

As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my cellar every autumn to wait for the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which shot down a ton of beautiful meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him and that, of course, is what horse manure has always been about.

In a poem of mine I tried to explain about the germination of all the summers of my life into one book.

I started the poem thus:

 
Byzantium, I come not from,
But from another time and place
Whose race was simple, tried and true;
As boy I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats ^[2] found to be true.
 

I mentioned Byzantium from the poem by Yeats because I wanted to show how old myths and legends became interwoven in the child’s imagination with the impressions and feelings of their real life.

I often visited Waukegan since my young years. It’s no more beautiful than any other small midwestern town. Much of it is green. The street in front of my old home is still paved with red bricks. Why then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my life. I had to write of it as I saw appropriate:

 
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we know ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.
 

Waukegan/Green Town/Byzantium.

So, Green Town did exist, and John Huff was the real name of a real boy. But he didn’t go away from me, I went away from him. And he is still alive, forty-two years later, and remembers our love.

There was also a Lonely One, and that was his name. And he moved around at night in my home town when I was six years old and he frightened everyone and was never caught.

And, of course, the big house itself, with Grandpa and Grandma and the boarders and uncles and aunts in it, existed.

The ravine, deep and dark at night, it was, and it is. I took my children there a few years ago. I can tell that the ravine is deeper, darker, and more mysterious than ever. I would not, even now, go home through there after seeing The Phantom of the Opera.

So that’s it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply.

Here is my glorification, then, of both death and life, dark and light, old and young, bright and stupid combined, pure joy and complete horror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, and then fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and took a notebook, and wrote his first “novel.”

And a final memory – fire balloons.

These days you don’t often see them, but in 1925 Illinois, we still had them. The last hour of a Fourth of July night many years ago is one of the last memories I have of my grandfather.Uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers were standing on the porch; Grandpa and I lit a small fire on the lawn and filled the pear-shaped red-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air. Then, very softly, we let that flickering thing go up on the summer air and away among the stars, as fragile, as wonderful, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself.

I can still see my grandfather there looking up at that flickering drifting light, thinking his own quiet thoughts. And I see me, with eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, and I knew there would never be another night like this.

We all just looked up at the sky and thought the same things, but nobody said anything. Someone finally had to say. And that one is me.

The dandelion wine still stands in the cellars below.

My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.

The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.

Why and how?

Because I say it is so.

Ray Bradbury

Summer, 1974

DANDELION WINE

It was still dark, and the town was still sleeping. Summer was felt in the warm early morning air. You had only to get up, go to the window, breath in and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

Douglas Spaulding, twelve years of age, awoke in his third-story cupola bedroom. He let himself idle a little on this first early morning of a long summer ahead. Lying in bed in the grandest tower in town, he felt the tall power it gave him, riding high in the June wind. Now a familiar task awaited him.

One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents’ cupola, and sleep in this magician’s tower with thunders and visions, then wake before the crystal tinkle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.

He went to the open window in the dark, deeply breathed in, and exhaled.

At once, the street lights went out. He exhaled again and again, and the stars began to disappear.

Douglas smiled. He started to point a finger in various directions, and yellow house lights began to wink in the darkness.

“Everyone yawn. Everyone up.”

The great house awoke below.

“Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass!”

He waited some time. “Grandma and Great-grandma, fry hot cakes!”

The warm smell of frying cakes drifted through the house and stirred the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins, in their rooms.

“Street where all the Old People live, wake up! Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take your pills, move around!”

“Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up.”

Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds flew up from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.

The sun began to rise.

He smiled a magician’s smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I order. It’ll be a fine season. He gave the town a last snap of his fingers.

Doors opened; people stepped out.

Summer 1928 began.

Douglas Spaulding felt that this day was going to be different. His father’s words, as he was driving Douglas and his ten-year-old brother Tom out of town toward the country, also meant that the day would be different. His father said that some days were just a mixture of smells, nothing but the world blowing in one nostril and out the other. Other days, he went on, were days of hearing every sound and trill of the universe. Some days were good for tasting and some for touching. And there were days that were good for all the senses at once. This day now, he said, smelled as if a great orchard had grown up overnight beyond the hills and filled the whole land with its warm freshness. The air felt like rain, but there were no clouds. In a moment, a stranger might laugh in the woods, but there was silence…

Douglas watched the land along the road. He smelled no orchards and sensed no rain, for he knew that without apple trees or clouds they could not exist. And as for that stranger laughing in the woods…?

But nevertheless, Douglas knew – this, without reason, was a special day.

The car stopped at the very center of the quiet forest, and they got out.

“Look for bees,” said Father. “Bees hang around grapes like boys around kitchens.”

They walked through the forest, and soon, Father pointed and said that there was where the big summer- quiet winds lived and passed in the green depths, like ghost whales, unseen.

Douglas looked quickly, saw nothing, and felt tricked by his father who, like Grandpa, lived on riddles. But… But, still… Douglas paused and listened.

Yes, something’s going to happen, he thought, I know it! We’re surrounded! he thought. It’ll happen! Come out, wherever you are, whatever you are! he cried silently.

Tom and Dad walked on ahead.

Now, thought Douglas, here it comes! Running! I don’t see it! Running! Almost on me!

“Fox grapes!” said Father. “We’re in luck, look here!”

Don’t! Douglas gasped.

But Tom and Dad started to pick up wild berries. The spell was broken. Douglas didn’t feel the magic running force any more. He dropped to his knees and started to pick up wild grapes.

“Lunch time, boys!”

With buckets half full with fox grapes and wild strawberries, they went to sit on a log followed by bees. Father said the bees were the world humming under its breath.They sat on the log, eating sandwiches and trying to listen to the forest the same way Father did.

“Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore,” Father said, “tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.”

Douglas chewed and didn’t feel any difference, it was just a sandwich.

Tom chewed and nodded. “I know just what you mean, Dad!”

Douglas thought about that strange feeling that something was running on him. Where is it now? Behind that bush! No, behind me! No here… almost here… He touched his stomach secretly.

He decided to wait; he knew it would come back. He also knew somehow that it wouldn’t hurt him. But what was it?

“You know how many baseball games we played this year, last year, year before?” asked Tom without any reason. Douglas watched Tom’s quickly moving lips.

“I wrote it down! One thousand five hundred sixty-eight games! How many times I brushed my teeth in ten years? Six thousand! Washing my hands: fifteen thousand. Ate six hundred peaches, eight hundred apples. Pears: two hundred. I don’t like pears very much. I’ve got statistics for everything! When I add up all things I’ve done in ten years, it will be billion millions.”

Douglas felt that unknown something coming close again. Why? Tom talking? But why Tom? Tom continued his statistics, enumerating books and matinees he had read and seen.

“During that time I think I’ve eaten four hundred lollipops, three hundred Tootsie Rolls, seven hundred icecreams…

Dad asked, “How many berries you’ve picked so far, Tom?”

“Two hundred fifty-six!” said Tom instantly.

Dad laughed and lunch was over and they started to pick up fox grapes and wild strawberries again. And again Douglas felt something was going to happen. He thought yes, it’s near again! Breathing on my neck, almost! Don’t look! Just work, fill up the bucket. If you look you’ll scare it off. Don’t lose it this time! But how do you bring it around here where you can see it, stare it right in the eye?

“Got a snowflake in a matchbox,” said Tom, smiling at his hand, red with berries juice.

Douglas wanted to yell at him, to stop him talking, but he thought the yell would scare the Thing away.

Then he noticed that the more Tom talked, the closer the great Thing came, it wasn’t scared of Tom. Tom attracted it with his breath, he was part of it!

Tom continued to explain how in February during a snowstorm he had let one snowflake fall in a matchbox and put the matchbox in the icebox.

The thing was close, very close. Douglas stared at Tom’s moving lips. He wanted to jump around, for he felt a huge wave lift up behind the forest. In an instant it would fall down, crush them forever…

“Yes, sir,” Tom said, picking grapes, “I’m the only guy in all Illinois who’s got a snowflake in summer. Precious as diamonds. Tomorrow I’ll open it. Doug, you can look, too…”