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With these thoughts I was struggling against the water, rowing hard, with Tony at my side. Maybe they were not dead, I thought, but why haven't they phoned instead of sending us a letter? We had always worked well together on the phone. Oh, yes the phones were down. But for how long had they been down? Nothing made sense anymore. Perhaps Nicolai had overstepped the line and was merely in trouble, needing my help. He never knew how many steps more it would take for the balance to swing against him. Even more agonizing than this thought was the thought that I may have contributed, unknowingly, to swinging that balance. Then the thought reoccurred that he had died in the disaster together with Antonovna, and that his message in the letter was the beginning of the end for us all.
The thought brought a painful feeling, a feeling that welled up deep inside with all the power and emotions of Giuseppe Verdi's great requiem in which Verdi had dramatized the interface between life and the paradox called death. It was as if Verdi had written this piece for the unfolding reality of the giant steel hull of the Typhoon looming ominously in the dark, and the more ominous foreboding of the contents of the letter. But there was a note of hope contained in the requiem?
This hope and the dread of doom became intermingled against the background of the requiem that I knew all too well. In writing this requiem, Verdi appears to have decided that one must truly experience the horror and the excitement of the Dies Irae, the Pathos, the Kyrie, and the peace in the Offertorio, and most of all the joy of the Sanctus and the urgency in the Libera me. Verdi might have found it imperative that one experiences these in order that one recognize the infinite scope of this overwhelming process of life that culminates into the unknown. Even now, I found it hard to accept doom as a final reality. We had achieved so much, come through great trials, won momentous victories, we even changed the world a little for the better. Maybe we were facing merely another challenge, a challenge that we could win and come out richer in the end? This had happened before, even if it would take years for the resolution to unfold. Where there is love, there is always a reason for hope. We had experienced that.
In the Russian tradition the word, pathetique, means passion, perhaps this was the pathos in Verdi's music. I could feel that passion Verdi had set to music, a passion for life that was suddenly put into the twilight. I experienced the overriding urgency for Libera me and the hope that it represented, but where was the peace, the joyous peace of the Sanctus?
Maybe I shouldn't puzzle over this, I thought, and lose myself in this sullen mood driven by fear mixed with self-accusation and hope, drawn with grief without knowing the facts. One thing was certain, and I realized this clearly, this wasn't the way our life had been. Our days had unfolded, play-like at first, but later rapturous like the sun. We had had the world in our hands, had shaped its future. We had started tremendous movements and Nicolai was strangely connected with them all. How could it now end like this with the dreaded disintegration of sanity that we had already feared for decades, the kind, which would unleash the final, unstoppable termination of human life?
This eventuality had been talked about for half a century, though it had never been addressed in any meaningful way. We had made some strides in that direction? Had our efforts been too slight, and our achievements too feeble?
Moments later when a cold wind swept in from the north I wondered if my self-surrender to grief was merely an echo of the nightfall and nothing more than that. As the darkness increased, it drew the ocean and sky together into one single featureless whole. It darkened the soul, even though a tiny part of the real world that we had struggled through and had explored had been golden with a sparkle that nothing in this world had caused or could erase.
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