by Jane Smiley
“In the next scene, you see her being fitted for her wedding gown. Meanwhile, an Italian shows up at the castle in Damascus, and our Italian visits him, asks the news, and then he runs to Saladin. Cut to the tree, budding out—”
“I love all of this natural stuff,” said Elena.
“Well, the story was clearly not a modern story, and more Disney story than anything else. But the backgrounds and settings were mesmerizing and incredibly detailed, the way anime always is. Cut to our Italian, realizing that no ship could get him there fast enough. So—and I love this scene—they take him to a room in a high tower in the palace, and they lay him out on a bed and they give him a potion and he falls asleep, and then Saladin puts many treasures on the bed, and the magician does his thing, and out the bed goes through the window and into the night sky, and it sails over the Mediterranean, and you can see the moon up above and the tiny ships down below, and pretty soon, the bed comes in for a landing, just before dawn, in front of the altar in a church. As the sun comes up, an old sleepy man creeps into the church to light the candles, and—boom—there’s this bed with this inert man in it, and the old guy drops his candle and runs, and a few moments later, as our Italian is waking up, the old guy and his boss tiptoe up to the bed, and the two guys recognize each other and hug. The next thing you see is the wedding procession approaching the church, and the bride looks sad, but her brothers are poking her from behind, and when she gets into the church, she sees this strange man in Islamic robes and a beard and a turban, and he keeps catching her eye, so she sends him a goblet of wine, which he drinks, and then he puts a ring in it and sends it back to her. She realizes who it is, and runs to him, and they embrace. The last scene is of them on their horses, out hawking in the light of dawn, and the two hawks fly away together and return, reflected in the surface of the lake.”
Elena was passing Mandeville Canyon. She said, “That sounds very nice. Maybe he could, or should, make this Ukrainian movie in anime.”
“Well, Stoney suggested that. But Mike told him anime is all very nice for peace, but for war you need real flesh. That’s exactly what he said. In English.”
“He seems kind of obsessed with the Middle East. I thought he was Russian.”
“I guess he’s from some part that is more Asian. But look at the place we’re staying. He’s like the walking manifestation of globalization.”
Elena turned up the hill toward Max’s house.
Isabel went on, “It was a nice movie. It was reassuring in some way. Here it was made in Japan about Syria and Italy, with Russian subtitles, and no Americans were around, forcing it to be about American needs and wants, or telling it to be a certain way. It was about being friends without any reference to Americans at all.”
“If only they could ignore us,” said Elena, and Isabel nodded, but then said, “My economics professor always said that soon enough they will be ignoring us, once China is the superpower.” Elena groaned. She said, “I find it so hard to get used to being the bad guy.”
“Do you?” said Isabel. She pursed her lips and pushed her hair out of her face, then said, “I think that’s because you’re white. Against all the evidence, white people in America always cling to their own innocence and forgive themselves for whatever they’ve done, or if they themselves did not do it, whatever was done in their names. We used to talk about that in my job in New York. Is it guilt? I don’t think it even rises to that level.”
“How about ignorance?”
“Is that all it is? I don’t think so. I think of it as a sense of entitlement. I mean, it goes beyond that time we were talking and Charlie couldn’t get over the idea that someone might come and try to take his house or his car or something. There are so many histories of the last fifty years that show that Americans haven’t been the good guys at all, and that a lot of people in the world are justifiably resentful of American interference in their national life, and I’m not even talking about old genocides against the native peoples and crimes against humanity, like slavery, that it took generations to acknowledge. I’m only talking about assassinated leaders we didn’t like, and giving Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction that he used on the Kurds. I mean, everyone just goes along thinking that that kind of sensitivity about criticizing white people in this country is justified or normal. So, yeah, you hate thinking of yourself as the bad guy, but why are you only starting to think of yourself as the bad guy right now?” Then she glanced at Elena a bit defiantly.
And, yes, Elena could feel it in herself, even as Isabel described it, that moral resentment—the very things she herself could have and sometimes had asserted with a feeling of self-righteousness irritated her coming from Isabel, tall, good-looking, privileged, twenty-three years old, well educated, and, yes, in the official tradition of race in America, black, but hardly justified in calling herself that. Irritation, the feeling of her pride beginning to engulf her reason and her better nature. But Elena didn’t say anything, only continued up the hill, trying to stem that “Who does she think she is?” reaction she was having. She thought of Max, because, of course, here was his house. But Max’s image did not stem the vertigo. She thought of Simon. But that was worse. Her greatest attachment was to Simon, and she had cultivated her attachment with love and care, but, truthfully, if she were to admit it, she was a cat who had given birth to a dog. The two of them, mother and son, would not be nesting together ever again. And what would happen to Simon in such a world as this new one?
She pulled up in front of Max’s house. Isabel threw open her door and jumped out, but Elena sat there for a moment and reassembled herself. She had to think of her book, her kitchen, her house in the flats of Beverly Hills. She had to think of her clothes and her habits and the cable-knit sweater she was knitting that she hadn’t touched in months. She had to think of the orderly manner in which her days had progressed before this war, and to remember that they could progress like that again, task by task, crumb by crumb dropping to the floor of the dark forest, showing the way out again. She had to think of her many convictions and beliefs, and tell herself that they constituted a life, and as she thought of them, she saw Isabel swoop down and pick up the newspapers and carry them into the house, and she knew that she wouldn’t have the courage to ask for them.
Meanwhile, back at the manse, Stoney was having several self-defeating thoughts. The first of these was that every man in the room with him, in the My Fair Lady study, was both older and bigger than he was. Mike was almost as tall as Max and two sizes larger (forty-six in the chest anyway—though, from the looks of his jacket, his tailor measured him by the millimeter). Stoney himself would have liked to think that he wore a forty; in fact, a forty was a little roomy for him, but, should he admit to the thirty-eight, then that would mean that he wasn’t working out as much as he should be and that pretty soon he would weigh less than Isabel, or perhaps not, but last night in the Amber Room, when he took off his shirt, he had tried not to cross directly in front of the mirror. He cleared his throat and tried to project a slightly deeper voice. He said, “Mike, Alex—”
“Al,” boomed the third guy, a forty-four for sure.
“Al, and Sergei.”
Sergei nodded.
They pulled out chairs and sat around the black-walnut library table. In the middle were two silver pots of coffee, and in front of Mike was a silver pot of tea that looked like a crouching cat. The handle was the tail, curving upward, and the spout was the cat’s open lips. Next to the teapot, on a plate, was what appeared to be an antique glass cradled in a silver holder. It didn’t seem to be part of the same set as the cat, because the holder was shaped to look like a trellis of leaves bearing a single five-petaled flower. After they all sat down, they all cleared their throats. Stoney cleared his throat.
For most of the night, in the Amber Room, which he considered dark and bizarre but which Isabel liked (at least the bathroom and the dressing room were not paneled in amber, but were mostly white with tigereye accents, like han
dles and knobs and mirror frames), he had lain awake attempting to imagine Jerry doing this deal. Jerry had perfected a sort of tall-agent method. Loud voice, in-your-face manner, and actual arm-twisting, if he had to go that far. He didn’t present it as arm-twisting. He only happened to grab your hand enthusiastically, as if he were about to shake it, but if things didn’t go to his satisfaction, as they so often had not when Stoney was in high school and not operating on the most responsible level possible, arm-twisting could ensue before you knew it, either lateral arm-twisting, where he simply turned your hand and wrist until it hurt and you couldn’t get out of it, or four-way arm-twisting, where he maintained his grip on your hand no matter what you did and suddenly stepped behind you. Jerry had been tall for a Jew. If you saw him palling around with Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner and some of those old comics he liked, they looked like a set of superannuated wiseguys, and you always stepped aside. Jerry could tell you that he knew best for you, and often, out of sheer fear and even agony, you would agree to what he suggested, and there you were, rich and famous. Or, if you were Stoney, at least not flunking out.
And Jerry had a partner, also successful, also now dead, but very far from tall, named Milt Perera. Milt might have been five feet, and Hispanic-looking, but volatile and Jewish to the core, and his technique was to appear to be about to explode. He would say it—“You don’t take this deal, you don’t sign on the dotted line here, and you’re gonna have to scrape me off the windas and sweep me out the door; I mean it, if you are that stupid so as to not take this deal after I’ve put it all together for you, who do you think you are, I’ve got to ask myself, but it’s gonna be me that suffers, because I’m not gonna be able to stand it, at the very moment you do not sign this deal, at the very moment you do not say, Milt, this is the best deal I ever saw, at that very moment something will happen to me, I can’t say what, but I feel it right here.” And then he would make a fist and hit himself on the breastbone, produce a large burp, and say, “That was nothing. Just don’t light any smokes in here.”
But imagining Jerry and imagining Milt only reminded him that many many things were riding on this deal, not least the future of Hollywood, if he might be so bold as to think that, and possibly the future of the world, or at least East-West relations and the fate of the Middle East, because he had sat up through the night in the Amber Room with all those candles lit, and he and Isabel had read that book Taras Bulba back and forth across the bed to one another for an hour, after that strange anime thing Mike had financed before (best not mention that to Max), and they had seen the whole movie as if it were taking place right on the screen behind the mirror in the wall opposite the bed.
What had struck Stoney about Taras Bulba were not the same scenes that, judging by the talk they had had in the kitchen last week, had struck Max—the battle scenes, the scenes inside the besieged Polish city, the romantic scenes with a woman who looked (in Stoney’s imagination) like a combination of Zoe and Isabel. What had struck him were the scenes in the Cossack encampment in the middle of a huge plain, under, in some sense within and surrounded by, sky. A wide camera angle could get that feeling of a landscape so large that it curved as the earth did, and men riding across it at the gallop. And then tight shots could capture the tips of the grasses grazing the ears of the horses, the lines of mounted Cossacks parting the flower-decked stems as they galloped through, not over, the grass. Moviemaking technology had arrived at a place where that kind of detail embedded in that kind of panorama was possible—and Max had very much liked Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and once had expressed an interest in doing something similar. Of course, he hadn’t expressed it lately. But Stoney had imagined how it could be, and Isabel had gotten enthusiastic, too—according to her, you wouldn’t have to change the book one bit in order to show the way religious conflict destroyed relationships and families and towns and settlements and the ecosystem. Just one shot of bloated bodies of horses and townspeople and children and Cossacks floating down the river (all done by digital imaging, of course—“No children or animals were harmed in the making of this film”) and people would be walking out of the theater as pacifists. Isabel had gotten very enthusiastic.
So here they were, sitting in the My Fair Lady study, and Mike, Al, and Sergei looked to be about as far from pacifism as it was possible to be, but who was to say what their true ideals were?
Stoney cleared his throat again and said, “Well, I read through the book again last night, and it really is a wonderful piece of work. Of course, I don’t read Russian, so—”
Al said, “Gogol was truly a man from Ukraine. The Russians never understood him, though they were always eager to claim him. The Orthodox, the Soviets, the Tolstoyans. They all said this, that Gogol led directly to them, that he prophesied their coming. My own opinion is that he had stories bursting out of him like rockets. An incident goes in, rolls around, can’t help it, must come out, as a great funny story or a great tragic story, and Gogol himself has little control over this. Have you ever driven a Maserati?”
Stoney shook his head.
Al said, “The first time you drive a Maserati, you touch the accelerator and the car is already beyond you, a mile down the highway. Very dangerous. This is what I think it was like being Gogol.”
Sergei said, “Al used to be a professor of Russian literature at the university in Tula.”
“And now he drives a Maserati,” said Stoney. “I appreciate that.”
“I appreciate that, too,” said Al, straight-faced until everyone laughed.
“This is what is hard for me,” said Mike. “I read this book, and I see something that you can only see from reading this book—”
“What would that be?” said Max. He sat behind an empty coffee cup and saucer, and made no move to pour himself a cup. Of course this was a bad sign, as far as Stoney was concerned.
Mike glanced at Max, and paused, then said, “I see beautiful pictures that have never been painted, but have only been thought of. Look at these books here.” He waved his arm toward the upper balcony of shelves. “That side is the Russian. That side is the French. The English are right up there. I am a man who likes books. I read something every day. Those French books and those English books, it doesn’t matter whether they have been painted or photographed or not. The English books, most of them, you could act out right in this room and not feel that you were missing anything. The dialogue would be witty and the interactions of the actors full of innuendo and tension. The words are the most important things about them. But these Russian books, it is not sufficient for all of them that they are books. Some of them, yes, but not all of them. Merely being books is too private for them. They are asking to appear in front of us and show us something. I thought this one, a great book by a great writer, but one which is not the biggest one, though of course a very magnificent one, should be the first in my project. Then there would be others, of course.”
Stoney cast a sidelong glance at Max, who did not react to this, but Al and Sergei suddenly nodded. What business were they in, again? Mining or oil, Stoney thought Ben Avram had said, but it was always the case that everyone wanted to be a movie mogul.
Mike went on, “People in the East hunger for this, to be shown something about themselves that looks better than what they see around them. Here in America, you have forgotten what the effect of movies is, because you are so used to it. You think that it is entertainment, but, really, it is seeing yourself. Seeing yourself so much, all the time, not because you are required to but because you want to, and then you say that that is who you are. Look at these old American actors we think about. Let’s take this man Clark Gable, who was not a handsome man, at least to my eyes. He walked and talked a certain way and had a certain easy manner, making jokes and smiling to himself, and being quite tall and yet not being frightening, and people in America said, yes, he is like I am, and so America became great, because Americans used the movies to talk to themselves about who they were.”
Stoney
looked at Max. Max was nodding at this. That was reassuring.
Mike warmed to his subject. “Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando were cowboys one day, and so those in the audience talked to themselves about that cowboy history. In Russia we did not have this. The movies only talked to us about being a good Soviet citizen. No Russian in his right mind said, Oh, I am a Nikolai Alexandrov type from that movie I Gave My Life for a Tractor, and my girlfriend is a Nina Murmanskova type from that movie Six Fishing Boats Harvest the Northern Sea. Who would want to be that type? But it is time now, when Russians and Ukrainians, too, wonder about themselves, to give them something to think about.”
“Maybe it’s too late for that,” said Max. “Maybe the newness of movies has passed everywhere, not just in the U.S.”
“Maybe, but, you know, in Saint Petersburg many people still go to the ballet and the opera and the theater. People are used to going out and sitting in chairs and watching a show together, and they have not gotten used to something different, the way Americans have gotten used to staying home. Russians are sociable, Ukrainians are sociable, Kyrgyzians are sociable. If there is something on, good or bad, they will see it, even if they complain about it for the next week. Going out to a theater that is decorated in an elaborate way is much preferable to staying home. So—I think it is still possible to impress them with a thing to look at that is magnificent.”
