Bolshakov will utter a string of Russian obscenities, but he will rise up and reach for his trousers. He will make as if to step his feet into them but will then—as I gasp in foreknowledge of his intention—toss the trousers into Ingraham’s face, momentarily blocking his vision, and then he will lunge at Ingraham and seize with both hands the hand holding the gun and will attempt to twist the weapon from Ingraham’s grasp. The gun will go off. The two men will wrestle for possession of it, and I will find myself in my kitchen, desperately searching for some weapon: a knife or a bludgeon—for the drug may have left me submissive but it will not have rendered me incapable of thinking of aggressive maneuvers.
Ingraham and Bolshakov will be on the floor together, embracing in almost a parody of sex but fighting over possession of the pistol. I will find myself standing over them with a copper teakettle, the only thing I will have been able to think of as a weapon. I will be swinging the teakettle by its handle, waiting for a chance to bean Bolshakov with it. But the two men will be shifting position so rapidly in their struggle that I will not be able to get a good aim at Bolshakov’s skull, and I will fear hitting Ingraham instead by mistake.
The contest between the two men will not be exactly equal: Ingraham, fifty-seven years of age, will be the bigger, the heavier, ostensibly the stronger; but scrawny Bolshakov will have had, as a former KGB operative, annual training sessions in physical combat and the martial arts, and he will, alas, be in much better condition than Ingraham. I will fault myself for not having phoned for help immediately, but I will tell myself there has been no time.
There will be no time, and before I will have been able to intercede in any way, my tormentor will overpower my mentor and will regain possession of the weapon, with which Bolshakov will assassinate Ingraham at close range, firing three shots into his breast.
I will scream and hope that help will come.
“Drop your silly teakettle, Yekaterina,” Bolshakov will say, standing over the blood-spurting body of the Bard of the Bodarks. He will point the weapon at me. Panting desperately for breath, he will gasp, “Now it appears that I am going to have to shoot you also, without having consummated our relationship as I had intended.” He will aim the pistol in the direction of my heart, and he will conclude, “Oh, there was so much I wanted to say to you first! There was so much that you needed to know! But now it is too late! Take with you to hell the eternal memory of how your fictions destroyed my life!”
At the instant he pulls the trigger, from somewhere in the air—the top of a highboy, the top of a door frame—a ball of yellow fur will drop down on Bolshakov’s head, and sharp claws will pierce both sides of Bolshakov’s neck, and Bolshakov will scream in pain as he feels his jugular punctured, and his fired shot will enter the ceiling. With his free hand he will swat frantically at the cat clinging to his neck, but Morris, with incredible strength, will sink his claws even deeper into Bolshakov’s neck, and Bolshakov will fall to his knees, and I will bring the teakettle crashing down atop his head, careful to avoid hitting the cat too. Morris will release him and scamper away. I will hit Bolshakov again with the teakettle. And again. I will be tempted to pick up the pistol and shoot him with it, but I will realize that I am not capable of killing, even without the drug.
I will find myself standing dazed with a hideously battered teakettle in my hand, its bottom and sides mashed and dented by Bolshakov’s skull. Bolshakov will be totally unconscious. Ingraham will still retain the last vestige of his consciousness: his eyes glazed and rolling heavenward, his hand clutching his breast as if to stop the pouring out of his life’s blood. I will drop down and kneel beside him. He will be beyond medical help.
He will attempt to focus his eyes upon me and will utter a word, which I will not be able to hear. I will incline my ear to his mouth. “Louder, Ingraham,” I will beg.
He will repeat himself, the one word audible: “Sister.”
I will rest my cheek against his cheek, and I will begin weeping. “Brother,” I will say.
He will close his tortured eyes, but he will not be quite dead. He will say one thing more: “Bury me in the woods of Stick Around.”
“Stick around,” I will say, and only afterward, after they have taken his body away, will I realize that I will not have simply confirmed his final two words but will have spoken them as a futile entreaty, as futile as the entreaty that the namer of the town originally made.
III
The rest—and I will have to plagiarize in my haste—will be a little flattish and faded. After the officers have come and done all of their business—the sheriff ’s officers first, who will manacle and revive the assassin, handling him roughly, restoring him to consciousness enough so that I can spit in his face and hear his final words to me, “Aha, Yekaterina! That was your substitute for the semen you could not give me!”—after the sheriff himself has questioned me about what transpired and why—after the sheriff ’s photographer has snapped the body from all angles—after the coroner’s men have taken it away—and after, finally, the wicked drug Bolshakov gave me has worn off, leaving me…I will almost write, myself again, but I shall never be myself again, nor shall I ever write again—leaving me too wakeful to get through the long night, I will haul out my bottle of Stolichnaya and I will sit for a long time beside the telephone, wanting to call Sharon or somebody, even Travis, perhaps (it will still be before midnight on the coast, whereas Sharon will have been in bed asleep beside her Larry for a long time now). I will sit, continually refilling my glass with vodka, and at last my cat, my savior, will reappear, and I will decide to talk to him.
The next morning, this morning, late, approaching noon, the first thing I will remember will be that I have an appointment today to be interviewed by the Paris Review. I will be tempted to phone to cancel the appointment. But probably the interviewer will already be on her way, arriving at any minute.
The second thing I will remember—and I will be mindful that I am deliberately not remembering what will have happened in this apartment the night before—will be the dreamlike conversation I will have had with Morris. It will seem that for some time I will have thanked him for having saved my life but will have received no word of acknowledgment from him in return. It will seem that I will have consumed, even for me, an inordinate amount of vodka, and that I will have begun to pour out to Morris my feelings for Ingraham, the depths of my sadness, my sense of responsibility, my sense of guilt: If I had not persuaded him to stick around the night before he might very well still have been living even as I will be speaking. It will seem that Morris has listened patiently, sympathetically, mournfully, but has said nothing in reply.
I will not be able to recall if the words I eventually hear from Morris are actually spoken by him or are only dreamt by me in whatever semblance of sleep I will finally attain. Will I actually succeed in sleeping? The state of shock in which I will have remained will not keep me continually awake so much as the fear that the preview of death that every sleep actually is will terrify me too much to allow myself to enter it. Will Morris know of my terror of sleep’s preparation for dying? It will seem to me that he will ultimately begin to speak, lecturing me about the differences between sleep and death, the one’s uncontrolled plunge into disjointed events, the other’s beautifully orchestrated travel through the harmony of time; the one’s fitful sense of being subjected to puzzling phenomena, the other’s excellent knowing of the final union of personal will and cosmic purpose. It will seem that Morris will have reminded me of his—or of Dan’s (or will they not be the same?)—earlier commentary about the error in my obituary: The condition of death is not an isolation or a loneliness but their antithesis, like a “surprise birthday party, only with, if you can possibly imagine it, the entire departed population of earth in attendance. The lifeless are free to pick and choose which of those billions they may communicate with, but all of them are there, almost like a multitude of angels dancing on the head of a pin. So death, angel, is unimaginably not solitary
but social.”
“Did you call me ‘angel’ last night?” I will ask Morris. “Or early this morning?” But he will only commence washing himself in that way that self-conscious cats respond to spoken questions.
I will pour myself a slug of vodka, preparing myself for the interview. I will tell myself that I ought to eat something, but I will have no appetite. My phone will ring, and I will rush to it, hoping it’s somebody social: Sharon or Travis or Liz. It will be somebody social: Jackie Randel, downstairs, letting me know that there are many media people on the phone and in the lobby, trying to get information about the previous night’s event, trying to get permission to interview me. Strangely, I will think that she is referring to the séance, for I will still not be permitting myself to remember the other event. Chatting with her on the phone, I will finish off my glass and refill it.
“Please don’t let anyone come up here,” I will request of her. “Except the person from Paris Review. That has nothing to do with last night.”
“The Paris Review person is here,” Jackie will inform me, “and has been here for an hour, waiting with the others.”
“Well, send her up,” I will acquiesce. “Tell her to knock two shorts and a long, so I’ll know it’s her.”
Waiting, I will stand at my window, and I will realize how uninteresting the view has become. A panorama from a peak loses its show through habit. The view falls away but so does the thrill. A summit leads only down. Not even that jumbo chunk of poshlost, Christ with his cement arms outstretched, can uplift me. I’ve got a long way to descend.
Somewhere out there, eastward, lies Stick Around, and I will find myself forced to think at last of my murdered mentor and his final wish, and I will realize that I will have to go, soon, to that village to attend his funeral and add my rock to the cairn that marks his hillside grave.
Thinking of cairms, I will picture Svanetia and the royal graveyard beside Saint George’s church at Etseri, where I ought to be buried among my kin, although most real Svanetians seem to have preferred being buried in isolated cairns on the mountainsides. Death may be social and unimaginably gregarious, as Dan suggests, but our remains can only be interred in absolute solitude.
It will occur to me that Ingraham must have been fated to meet me and swear brotherhood so that I could honor his final request. Who fated him? Is Anangka still with me?
“Anangka?” I will call aloud, and I will address her in my native tongue: “Im, imte, imetchu, Anangka?”
But of course there will be no answer.
And yet, having spoken my own language again for the first time in ages, I will suddenly be seized with an idea, an ambition: to write a great Americanization of the Georgian epic, Rustavelli’s Knight in the Tiger’s Skin. I will set it in the Bodarks, in the history of Stick Around, in tribute to Ingraham, and I will call it The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, since the old Bodarkers called their mountain lion a panther.
Whatever, a feline. “Morris!” I will call out for him. “I’ve got a new book idea!”
And I will think of stopping, right after Ingraham’s funeral, at Lara Burns’s cabin, to visit her A Cat Arena and to sit and
The last manuscript page from V. Kelian’s Louder, Engram.
V. Kelian
the ART of FICTION
cxxxviii
V. Kelian is the pseudonym of Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadeshkeliani, who was born on May 27, 1953, at Lisedi, a remote village in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. Her father, Vladimir Alexandrovich Dadeshkeliani, would have been the ruling prince of Svanetia had not that principality, along with all of Georgia, been communized by the Soviet Union in 1922. Kelian would have become ruling princess if she had chosen to return to Svanetia after it regained its sovereignty following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of Georgian independence.
She majored in botany at Tbilisi University and received the equivalent of a doctorate in mycology at the University of Leningrad. A distinguished mycologist, she has published a number of scientific papers on mushrooms and is the discoverer of the rare Bodarks species Mutinus ekaterinus, which is named after her.
While teaching botany at her alma mater in Tbilisi in 1976, she was arrested at a human rights protest along with several other Georgian dissidents, including Zviad Ghamsakhurdia (who later became president of independent Georgia). She spent three years in detention in Soviet Russia, both at Moscow’s Serbsky Psychiatric Institute and at the strict regime prison for women in Ishimbay. Her experiences formed the basis for her first novel, Georgie Boy, which she began writing while teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and which became an international success, both critical and financial, selling millions of copies in both hardcover and paperback worldwide. The triumph of this book and of the movie version of it, filmed by Trevor Kola (the first film of the noted actor Travis Coe), made it possible for Vladimirovna to lease and refurbish the top floors of an ancient Bodarks resort hotel, which became the setting for her stage play, The Hotel Mezzaluna.
Her other works include two collections of short stories, The Names of Seeking Games and Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain, the former set in the Bodarks, the latter the only one of her books with a Svanetian setting. Her novel Original Flavor was also a best-seller, and the review of it was a Time magazine cover story. Her major nonfiction study of American Indians, Dawn of the Osage, was a critical but not a popular success. Posthumously will be published her last novel, Earthstar, and an unfinished memoir, Louder, Engram!
She died on Svanetian Saint George’s Day, the death day of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the birthday of her idol, Nabokov, and was buried on a hillside in a remote area of the Bodarks.
The interview was conducted in less than favorable circumstances: only the night before, a dear friend of Kelian’s had been murdered in her spacious triplex apartment on the top floors of one wing of the fortresslike Halfmoon Hotel, atop a mountain in Arcata Springs, where she had lived and worked for the past decade. The staff of the hotel had made a token gesture of tidying up after the incident, but there were still bloodstains all over the carpet. Kelian, a stunningly beautiful woman who spoke softly, with only a trace of an accent that somehow seemed more Bodarkadian than Svanetian, suggested that the interview ought to be conducted in her library, which had not been disturbed or bloodied during the foul play.
Noting the interviewer’s allergy to cats, Kelian graciously removed her pet, a male tabby of marmalade color and many years, and latched the door to the animal’s Cat-Port so that he could not return during the course of the interview, which took place over the duration of the afternoon. Unlike many interviews in this series, the transcription is taken directly from the tape, without any editing by the subject.
INTERVIEWER
Is this a bad time for you? I could return another day.
V. KELIAN
We may as well get it over with. Do you mind if I drink?
INTERVIEWER
Not at all. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about last night’s crime?
KELIAN
I’d really rather you didn’t. It has no bearing on my work.
INTERVIEWER
But wasn’t the victim a fellow novelist?
KELIAN
Of such minor regard that he once confessed to me he had long ago despaired of being asked to do a Paris Review interview himself.
INTERVIEWER
Indeed. But he was your teacher and mentor, was he not? Wasn’t he responsible for bringing you to the Bodarks so many years ago?
KELIAN
Oh? You knew him, then?
INTERVIEWER
Most of us in the Bodarks at least know of him.
KELIAN
You are from the Bodarks? I did not know that.
INTERVIEWER
Yes. Like yourself, I originated elsewhere but chose this part of the country for its…But forgive me, I am anticipating your answers. One of my first questions for you is, What made you choose the
Bodarks? I should think these hills do not really resemble your native Svanetia, which is extremely mountainous and rugged.
KELIAN
The resemblance is more spiritual than topographic. I came here as part of an accident of destiny. All of my life I have been aware of being guided—sometimes commanded—by forces or fates outside my own control.
INTERVIEWER
One might argue that your books themselves were thus composed not wholly by yourself but by those fates or forces?
KELIAN
No, my books are the only things in my life over which I have exercised absolute control. That is why I write, perhaps why any novelist writes: to have some sense of being in charge, of being capable, of being complete master of one’s own vessel.
INTERVIEWER
And yet, in the history of your well-known paraphilia for twelve-year-old boys, did you not consider yourself in utter control of those youths as well?
KELIAN
Shall we not delve into my personal life?
INTERVIEWER
How can you separate your personal life from your fiction, when your fiction is replete with the manifestation of that paraphilia?
KELIAN
My fiction is invented and belongs to the public. My life is real and belongs to myself.
INTERVIEWER
Your critics have charged that all of your books are romans à clef, that you are incapable of concocting a purely imaginative plot or a character who is not closely based upon someone you’ve known.
KELIAN
Ha! So the characters in Hotel Mezzaluna are real, are they? A bunch of ghosts?
INTERVIEWER
I was going to ask you about that. Isn’t it true that even your four “ghosts” in that “play for voices” are taken directly from actual historical ghosts who have been seen or heard by actual persons in this actual hotel?
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 39
