The Lotus

“Lotus” is a grand existentialist journey, where the theme of the Great Death being swallowed by Great Life is played out.

IF WE BREATHE TOGETHER, THE AIR OF THE EARTH WILL RISE INTO AN UNSEEN HURRICANE. WE HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO COMPOSE A FITTING REQUIEM FOR EACH. WE WILL PERFORM IT GENTLY, DEVOUTLY, WITH ELEVATED SORROW.

The artist Lokhov did not shave before leaving and carried his day-old stubble all the way to his mother’s mortal deathbed. Carefully kissing the old woman’s motionless white face, he breathed in the scent of the putrefying body; she, without opening her eyes, turned away with a faint groan. He loved her, so many tender words he wanted to say to his mother at their meeting after all those years of separation—and now it was no longer necessary to say anything. A quick gray winter day passed; outside, an early February evening fell, and a night blizzard was brewing in the dark, flinging snowy sleeves of wind. The air was growing icy: huge blocks of ice piled up on the shoreline rocks, splashed over by the surf, while his mother’s dying body turned stiff.

Lokhov thought his mother heard nothing, understood nothing, could not think or remember the past—as he himself sat beside her. He had been too late; he hadn’t had time to ask her for forgiveness. Now he couldn’t explain to her why he had tortured himself and tortured her—he only thought, with despair.

But the mother saw a strip of light through a narrow crack, and this crack shone through her eyes between her eyelids, barely closed. She heard muffled voices from beyond the threshold—voices of people speaking. She also heard the distant singing of the Choir of Life, the snowy whisper of the approaching blizzard, and the crystal tinkling of ice floes in the sea, where shuga was beginning to form. The dying woman’s mind no longer distinguished close time from distant time, and everything arising in her memories one after another belonged neither to the past nor to the present—it was free from the power of time.