Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  The line to Amélia went down, vanished, became irrelevant from that moment on.

  18

  Na Zdrovia!

  The very moment Sergei Korolyov picked up Magdalena in his Aston Martin to drive to Hallandale for dinner, Nestor, accompanied by John Smith, found a parking place on a block where dilapidation reigned. Nestor had never seen so many windows with sheets of metal nailed over them in his life. He and John Smith had different takes on this part of town, now called “Wynwood,” which suggested lufts and wafts of zephyrs on an ancestral estate’s horticultured sylvan glade, where Igor maintained his official studio, his out-front studio, so to speak, the one with a telephone listing. Wynwood bordered on Overtown, and Nestor, being a cop, saw it as a worn-out old industrial area full of decrepit one-, two-, and three-story warehouses that weren’t worth rehabilitating… and a rat’s nest of Puerto Rican petty criminals who weren’t, either. John Smith, on the other hand, saw it as Miami’s version of a curious new social phenomenon—and oh, yes! real estate phenomenon—of the late twentieth century: the “art district.”

  Art districts had popped up all over the place… SoHo (south of Houston Street) in New York… SoWa (south of Washington Street) in Boston… Downcity in Providence, Rhode Island… Shockoe Slip in Richmond, Virginia… and all of them were born the same way. Some enterprising real estate developer starts buying up a superannuated section of town full of dilapidated old loft buildings. Then he whistles for the artists—talent or utter lack of it makes no difference—and offers them large lofts at laughably low rents… lets it be known that this is the new artists quarter… and in three years or less… Get out of the way!… Here they come!… droves of well-educated and well-heeled people skipping and screaming with nostalgie de la boue, “nostalgia for the mud”… eager to inhale the emanations of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor of it all.

  In Wynwood even the palm trees were bohemian… poor raggedy strays… one over here… another one over there… and all of them mangy. The nostalgia-for-the-mudders wouldn’t have had it any other way. They didn’t want grand allées of stately palms. Grand allées didn’t give off emanations of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor.

  At this very moment Nestor and John Smith were on a freight elevator, bound for Igor’s studio on the top floor of a three-story warehouse some developer had turned into loft condominiums. All the elevators in the building were freight elevators… operated by sullen Mexicans who never said word one to anybody. There you had a reliable indicator of illegal-alien status. They didn’t want to draw any attention to themselves whatsoever. The nostalgia-for-the-mudders loved the freight elevators, despite the fact that they were ponderous, slow, and old-fashioned. Old-fashioned freight elevators gave off some of the nostalgie-de-la-muddiest emanations of all—the heavy electric groan of the industrial-strength pulley machinery overcoming inertia… the operator’s stone-sullen Mexican face…

  Nestor had a digital camera in his hands… studded with dials, meters, and gauges he’d never seen or heard of before. He held it up in front of John Smith as if it were some utterly unidentifiable foreign object. “What’s this supposed to accomplish? I don’t even know what you’re supposed to look through.”

  “You don’t have to look through anything,” said John Smith. “All you have to do is look at this image right here… and then you press this button. Actually—forget the image and just press the button. All we need is that little whine it makes. You only need to sound like a photographer.”

  Nestor shook his head. He couldn’t stand not knowing what he was doing… and he couldn’t stand it when John Smith and not himself was running the operation, despite John Smith’s smooth performance at the Advanced Yentas home up in Hallandale. John Smith still insisted on this business of using outright lies as reporting devices! He had called Igor on his listed telephone number and said the Herald had assigned him to do a story on the recent upsurge in realistic art in Miami… and people kept mentioning him, Igor, as one of the important figures in this movement. Igor turned out to be so vain, so eager to rise up from out of obscurity… he was ready to believe it, despite the fact that his work had appeared only in two largely ignored group shows… and that there had been no such “upsurge” and no such “movement.” In fact, John Smith had no such assignment, either, and wouldn’t have been able to get a real Herald photographer to come along with him. Besides, at this point he didn’t want anybody at the Herald to get wind of what he was doing. It was too early. He had to get the facts nailed down first. Hell, Topping the Fourth had turned severely squirrelly at the very mention of the subject.

  From the moment the elevator came to a lumbering, lurching stop on the third floor… lurching because the Mexican had to swing the tiller handle this way and that to make the floor of the enormous freight cab line up just right with the level of the floor outside… the nostalgie-de-la-mudders loved that part, the lumbering, lurching stop… it was so real… Even before the doors opened, Nestor and John Smith picked up the scent of their man… turpentine!… Upscale nostalgie-de-la-mudders might or might not object to the odor. But they couldn’t very well grumble, could they. Naturally there were working artists in these lofts, and naturally the painters were working with turpentine… You’re in the “art district,” my friend!… You’d best take the bitter with the better and consider it an emanation of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor of it all.

  As soon as Igor opened the door to his loft, it was obvious that he was primed for this major event in his so-far-negligible media life. His face was one great bright Rooooshian beam. If he had still had his outsized Salvador Dalí–jolly waxed mustache, it would have been really something. He had his arms stretched out. It looked like he was about to embrace them both in a Russian bear hug.

  “Dobro pozalovat!” he said in Russian, and in English, “Welcome! Come in! Come in!”

  Such booming bonhomie!—so much so that the two hard Cs in a row, Come in! Come in!, propelled the alcohol on his breath into Nestor’s and John Smith’s faces. He was bigger, more heavy chested, and drunker than Nestor remembered from the Honey Pot. And how art-district-fashionably he was dressed!… a long-sleeved black shirt with a silky sheen, rolled up to the elbows and open at the neck all the way down to the sternum… hanging outside a pair of too-tight-fitting black jeans in a game attempt to obscure his girth.

  The entrance took you straight into an open kitchen at one end of a space at least forty feet long and twenty feet wide. The ceiling must have been close to fourteen feet high, making the place seem enormous… likewise, a bank of towering old-fashioned warehouse windows way down at the other end. Even now, close to 4:00 p.m., the entire work area was flooded with natural light… the easels… the metal tables… a ladder… some tarpaulins… the same sort of stuff Igor had at his hideaway studio in Hallandale. Nestor’s survey of the premises came to an abrupt halt when Igor stuck his face right into his and exclaimed, “Ayyyyyyyyyyyy!” and took Nestor’s hand and gave it a shake that felt like it had dislocated every joint in his right arm and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner that among men means, You are my pal and we’ve survived a lot of good times together, haven’t we!

  “This is my photographer,” John Smith interjected—Nestor could tell that John Smith’s facile lying mind was churning to come up with a suitable fake name. Pop!—“Ned,” he said, probably because it started with Ne, like Nestor.

  “Nade!” was the way it sounded when Igor said it. With another gush of inexplicable merriment he maintained his grip on Nade’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder again. “We have a drink!” he said, reaching back to a kitchen counter and producing a bottle with a Stolichnaya vodka label but containing a pale amber liquid… He poured it into a big shot glass, which he hoisted with one hand and pointed at with the other.

  “Vodaprika!” he exclaimed, accenting the apri—and threw the entire shot-glassful down his gullet. His face turned arterial red. He emerged grinning and ga
sping for breath. When he finally exhaled, the air they breathed smelled like alcoholic vomitus.

  “I take the vodka and I give it a little—what do you say in English?—‘spitz’?—of apricot juice. You see? One little spitz—vodaprika! We all have some! You come!”

  With that, he led them to a big, long, stout wooden table with an odd lot of wooden chairs around it. He took the one at the head, and Nestor and John Smith flanked him. The big shot glasses awaited them. Igor brought his own shot glass and the bottle of vodaprika and a big platter of hors d’oeuvres… pickled cabbage with some kind of berries… salted cucumbers—big ones… slices of beef tongue with horseradish… salt herring… salted red salmon eggs (Low-Rent caviar)… pickled mushrooms, heaps of these briny beauties, intact or cut up and mixed with boiled potatoes, eggs, great slathers of butter and mayonnaise, great balls of them wrapped in pastry—guaranteed to keep a man warm up near the Arctic Circle and calorie-fried in Miami… all of it served in a heavy cloud of odeur de vomi.

  “Everybody thinks the Russians, they drink only the plain vodka,” said Igor. “And you know what? They are right! That’s all they drink!”

  Nestor could see John Smith trying to put a merry response on his baffled face.

  “And you know why they drink like this?” said Igor. “I show you. Na zdrovia!” He grabbed a gob of salt herring with his fingers, stuffed it down the gullet, and knocked back another big shot-glassful… more blazing-red face, gasps for breath… and a veritable fog of odeur de vomi.

  “You know why we do that? We don’t like the taste of the vodka. It tastes like the chemical! This way we don’t have to taste it. We only want zee alcohol. So why don’t we”—he pantomimed injecting his arm with a syringe—“take it like this?”

  That struck him as highly amusing. He picked up a big briny pastry ball from the platter with his fingers and stuffed it into his mouth and began chewing and talking at the same time. He picked up the bottle and refilled his glass and hoisted it once more as if to say, This one, this the vodaprika! He beamed at John Smith, and then he beamed at Nestor and then at John Smith again, and—bango!—knocked back another shot. “And now you drink!”

  It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t an order. It was a declaration. He poured each of them a glassful… and himself, too. “And now we go… when I say ‘Na zdrovia.’ Okay?”

  He looked at John Smith and then at Nestor… and what could you do but nod yes?

  “Na zdrovia!” he exclaimed, and all three of them tilted their heads back and tossed the drink down their gullets. Even before it hit bottom, Nestor realized that this goddamned shot glass was a lot bigger than he thought it was and had no apricot taste or any other taste to lessen the shock of what was impending. The damned thing hit bottom like a fireball, and he came up gagging and coughing. His eyes were flooding with tears. John Smith’s, too, and if his own face was now as red as John Smith’s, then it was a fiery red.

  Igor came up smiling and picking up a gob of salted herring from the platter with his fingers and shoving it into his mouth. He found Nestor’s and John Smith’s performance hilarious. Hah hah hah-hah-hah haha. Obviously he would have been disappointed if they had done any better.

  “Don’t worry!” he said merrily. “You must have practice! I give you two more times.”

  Jesus Christ! thought Nestor. This was the worst white-boy-wasted behavior he had ever seen! It was gross! And he was taking part in it! Cubans were not big drinkers. In what was meant to be a lighthearted way, he said, “Oh, no, thanks. I think I’ve got—”

  “No, Nade, we must have three!” said Igor. “You know? Otherwise—well, we must have three! You know?”

  Nestor looked at John Smith. John Smith looked at Nestor sternly, and slowly moved his head up and down in the yes mode. John Smith? He was so tall and skinny. He had no normal physical courage. But he would lie, cheat… and probably steal, although he hadn’t seen him do it yet… and now, it turned out, cauterize his gastrointestinal tract… to get a story.

  Nestor looked at Igor and with a feeling of doom muttered, “Okay.”

  “That’s good!” said Igor. He was very cheery about it as he refilled all three glasses.

  The next thing Nestor knew—“Na zdrovia!”—he threw his head back and tossed the vodaprika down his open maw—¡mierda!—and the gagging, the doubling over, the coughing, the gasping, the flood of tears were barely under control when—

  Na zdrovia! Another fireball—Ahhhhhhhughh… eeeeeeeeuuughhh… ushnayyyyyyyyyyyanuck splashed down his windpipe—burned his throat—gushed up into his nasal passages and came leaking down onto his pants—and Igor congratulated him and John Smith. “You did it! I celebrate you! Now you honorary muzhiks!”

  Somehow muzhiks didn’t sound all that great.

  Judging by his morbid face, John Smith had suffered as much as Nestor had. But John Smith was immediately all business. Out the corner of his mouth, in a low growl, he told Nestor, “Get busy and start taking pictures.”

  Get busy and start taking pictures? Why, you bastard! John Smith wasn’t putting on an act, either. My photographer! The bastard had started believing he was the commander! Nestor felt like throwing the damned digital camera through a window… although… hmmmmm… in tactical terms, he had to admit that John Smith was right. If he was supposed to be a photographer, he should start aiming the camera at something and pushing that dummy button. He felt good and humiliated when he so dutifully started taking pictures… dummy pictures, as instructed.

  Meantime, John Smith was shaking his head in wonderment and glancing toward Igor’s paintings on the walls as if he couldn’t help it. “That’s great, Igor… amazing! Is this your own personal collection?” said John Smith.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” said Igor, laughing in a way that says, “I forgive you for your lack of knowledge about such things.” “If only that was the truth!” He gestured with a lordly sweep of his hand toward both walls. “Two months from now, half of these will go and I must paint more of them. My agent, she keeps this all the time pressure.”

  “Your agent?” said John Smith. “You said she? It’s a woman?”

  “Why not?” Igor said with a shrug. “She is the best in all of Russia. Ask any Russian artist. They know her: Mirima Komenensky.”

  “Your agent is Russian?”

  “Why not?” Igor said with another shrug. “In Russia they still understand the real art. They understand the skill, the technique, the colors, the chiaroscuro, all of that.”

  John Smith produced a small tape recorder from his pocket and put it on the table with the sort of arching of the eyebrows that asks if this is all right. Igor answered yes with a magnanimous flip of the hand that dismissed any concerns on that score.

  “And what is the reaction to realism here in the US?” said John Smith.

  “Here?” said Igor. The very question made him laugh. “Here they like the fads. Here they think art begins with Picasso. Picasso left art school when he was fifteen. He said there was not anything more they could teach him. The very next semester they are teaching anatomy and perspective. If I not draw any better than Picasso, you know what I do?” He waited for an answer.

  “Uhhh… no,” said John Smith.

  “I will start new movement, call it Cubism!” Waves and gales of laughter came pouring out of Igor’s great lungs, alcoholizing the air still further, and Nestor felt himself swept away, struggling to avoid strangling in a vomitous stupor.

  Igor filled the three glasses again. He raised his and—

  “Na zdrovia!”

  —Igor threw his vodaprika down his gullet. But both Nestor and John Smith brought the glasses to their lips and tilted their heads back and faked it and came up going, Ahhhhhhhhhhh! in mock satisfaction and wrapping their hands around their shot glasses to hide the incriminating amber liquid that remained.

  Igor came up much too drunk to notice. He had knocked back five big shots of the stuff since they had been here—and only God knew how ma
ny before they arrived. Nestor felt good and drunk now, after three. It was anything but a happy intoxication, however. He felt as if he had impaired his central nervous system and could no longer think straight or use his hands deftly.

  “What about abstract art,” said John Smith, “like, say, ohhhh… Malevich, like the Maleviches in the Korolyov Museum of Art recently?”

  “Malevich!” Igor sent the name rolling on the crest of his biggest wave yet. “Funny you should say Malevich!” He winked at John Smith, and the wave rolled on. “You know, Malevich said that the realistic art, God already give you the picture, you only have to copy it. But in the abstract art, you have to be God and create it all yourself. Believe me, I know Malevich!” Another wink. “He had to say that! I have seen his work when he started out. He try to be realistic. He haf no skill! Nozzing! If I paint like Malevich, you know what I do? I start a new movement, call it Suprematism! Like Kandinsky.” He gave John Smith a significant smile… “You see Kandinsky when he start out. He try to paint a picture of a house… it look like a loaf of bread! So he give up and announce he start a new movement, he calls it Constructivism!” Both a wink and a smile for John Smith’s benefit.

  “What about Goncharova?” said John Smith. Now three artists were in play, names le tout Miami had been so grateful to the celebrated, the generous Sergei Korolyov for. What culture and luster he had given to the city!

  Igor gave John Smith a conspiratorial smile as if to say, “Yes! Exactly! We’re both thinking the same thing.”

  “Goncharova?!” exclaimed Igor. “She is most unskilled of all! She cannot draw, and so she makes the big mess of straight little lines, and they go here, and they go there, and they go in between, a real mess, and she say every line is a ray of light, and she gives it a name: ‘Rayonism.’ Rayonism! because my art is a new art, and why do I, the Creator, have to look behind me and think about the things already used and worn out… I don’t have to think the line and the anatomy and the three dimensions and the—how you say it? modeling?—or the perspective or the color harmony, any of those things… They were done… years ago… centuries ago, done until they die. They are from the past. You don’t bother me with the past! I am in front! All these things, they are somewhere back there!” He motioned back over his shoulder and then forward and upward. “And I am up here above all that.”