before going down the last few steps of the wooden ladder, using one arm to hold with superhuman strength his loved one on his lap, and grabbing onto the ladder with the other, while gazing at the half-shady half-green forest they were about to disappear into. Pavel Pavlovich Antipov withdrew to the side to watch the reaction this tray would create on his wife. One of the physicians he had consulted on his way over had stated that memory occasionally played vindictive tricks; the brain rewound when the body was nearing the end. Many patients, upon reaching a particular, often the very last stage of their lives, returned to their childhoods and to their mother tongue. Even a single object or a dream was sufficient to trigger such a transformation. Watching his wife Pavel Pavlovich Antipov wondered if the logbook was now turning the pages backwards to erase line by line all that was written within.
Yet Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova looked much more interested in the bonbons than the Vishniakov tray. Unaware of her husband’s worries, she randomly picked one, held it out with a grateful smile and asked what flavour it was. ‘Since it is pink, it must be strawberry,’ was the response she got. Pink! It had been so long since she had last seen pink. She took the wrapper off and threw the candy into her mouth. The colour pink had a nice smell and a syrupy flavour.
As the bonbon melted in her mouth, first the anxiety-stricken lips of the beautiful lover in the boyar’s lap, then everything around that was coloured in pink started to come to life. Agripina immediately reached for the other bonbons asking her husband the flavour each time. The yellow ones were lemon, reds cinnamon; greens were mint, oranges tangerine; browns caramel and the beige ones vanilla. Then she tasted them. Yellow was a sour colour, red sharp; green scorched, orange tangy; brown was astringent and beige puckered. With each new bonbon she tasted, the colours Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova had left in Istanbul returned to her. She watched as her bed against the wall, the chair and desk in front of the window, the cherry tree side table with all sorts of medicine on top, the Virgin Mary icon and the august face of Saint Seraphim swinging from her necklace revealed themselves. She ran to the windows in bewilderment only to be taken aback by the scenery that greeted her. All the colours were in place. Burnt was the colour of the vineyards extending from the slope of the hill into the horizon, tar the dresses of the peasant women singing as they filled their large baskets with thick skinned grapes, sharp the trees that sheltered shrill swallows and sour the sun in the sky. Colours were everywhere, but not as many were inside as outside. An idea occurred to her just then. She went back and collected the myriad of wrappers of the bonbons she had eaten. Through these spectacles she looked at the clinic where so many years of her life had been spent. As she put down one wrapper and picked up another, the dreary whiteness of the cold stone building’s halls, the walls of the rooms, physicians’ uniforms, the pale faces of the nurses adorned with reserved smiles, the pills she had to swallow twice a day, the bed sheets changed by the maids every other day and those tasteless soups placed in front of her; all of these things were suddenly dyed in their own colours – as was the man standing across from her. The only thing that did not change was the fretful look on his face.
Agripina did not stop. Not only did she not stop, she placedthe wrappers on top of one another creating new hues. After a few attempts she placed red on top of blue and witnessed the whole world turn purple. A wheezing cry escaped her lips: ‘Is-tan-bul!’ She had found it. She had found the colour that had escaped her on the deck of that rotten, reeking boat where she had stood at the age of nineteen with a small swelling in her womb and a larger one on her back. In the spectrum of colours and
Yet Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova looked much more interested in the bonbons than the Vishniakov tray. Unaware of her husband’s worries, she randomly picked one, held it out with a grateful smile and asked what flavour it was. ‘Since it is pink, it must be strawberry,’ was the response she got. Pink! It had been so long since she had last seen pink. She took the wrapper off and threw the candy into her mouth. The colour pink had a nice smell and a syrupy flavour.
As the bonbon melted in her mouth, first the anxiety-stricken lips of the beautiful lover in the boyar’s lap, then everything around that was coloured in pink started to come to life. Agripina immediately reached for the other bonbons asking her husband the flavour each time. The yellow ones were lemon, reds cinnamon; greens were mint, oranges tangerine; browns caramel and the beige ones vanilla. Then she tasted them. Yellow was a sour colour, red sharp; green scorched, orange tangy; brown was astringent and beige puckered. With each new bonbon she tasted, the colours Agripina Fyodorovna Antipova had left in Istanbul returned to her. She watched as her bed against the wall, the chair and desk in front of the window, the cherry tree side table with all sorts of medicine on top, the Virgin Mary icon and the august face of Saint Seraphim swinging from her necklace revealed themselves. She ran to the windows in bewilderment only to be taken aback by the scenery that greeted her. All the colours were in place. Burnt was the colour of the vineyards extending from the slope of the hill into the horizon, tar the dresses of the peasant women singing as they filled their large baskets with thick skinned grapes, sharp the trees that sheltered shrill swallows and sour the sun in the sky. Colours were everywhere, but not as many were inside as outside. An idea occurred to her just then. She went back and collected the myriad of wrappers of the bonbons she had eaten. Through these spectacles she looked at the clinic where so many years of her life had been spent. As she put down one wrapper and picked up another, the dreary whiteness of the cold stone building’s halls, the walls of the rooms, physicians’ uniforms, the pale faces of the nurses adorned with reserved smiles, the pills she had to swallow twice a day, the bed sheets changed by the maids every other day and those tasteless soups placed in front of her; all of these things were suddenly dyed in their own colours – as was the man standing across from her. The only thing that did not change was the fretful look on his face.
Agripina did not stop. Not only did she not stop, she placedthe wrappers on top of one another creating new hues. After a few attempts she placed red on top of blue and witnessed the whole world turn purple. A wheezing cry escaped her lips: ‘Is-tan-bul!’ She had found it. She had found the colour that had escaped her on the deck of that rotten, reeking boat where she had stood at the age of nineteen with a small swelling in her womb and a larger one on her back. In the spectrum of colours and
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