Himalayan bear, Doivber Levin, sequestered himself, mouse-like, in children’s literature. True, he was the quietest and least visible member of the OBERIU group, but in those days people were being put to death for lesser sins than writing “in an experimental style.” Ferris was convinced that the conversation between him and his friend L. Panteleev—during which Levin uttered the fateful words: It’s over! All the lights have been snuffed out all over the world—takes place in 1937, though L. Panteleev avers that the exchange occurred in 1939. Fears ate at Doivber Levin like pernicious bedbugs: fear of death, fear of life, fear of irrelevance, fear of fear, fear of everything . . .
For whatever reason, Ferris believes that Levin’s pragmatic wife plays a crucial role in all this, a little Soviet desk-clerk armed with powerful weapons: the stamp and the seal. She obtains all the documents required for a move to Birobidzhan; this, she thinks, is the safest place in the world for Doivber. First, she knows Levin was cheating on her with a “hussy,” so she feels that dispatching him to such a faraway place is fair enough as punishment; second, she is gratified at having the creative reach of Fate; third she loves her Boba, her “big bear,” and she cannot tolerate the thought that any of the things happening to so many of those around him might happen to him. And, just like Fate, this little Soviet desk clerk falsifies a document, four years hence, certifying Levin’s heroic death in the village of Pogostie. Ferris’s book includes a copy of the document that seems to verify Boris Mikhailovich (Doivber) Levin’s death on December 17, 1941, in Pogostie, side-by-side with a copy of a document issued on December 17, 1937, permitting someone by the name of BerDov Levi to travel to the JAO, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, the administrative seat of the future Jewish state of Birobidzhan. And a copy of his passport is included in Ferris’s book as well.
These three fake documents are the only ones Ferris is able to obtain. The rest of what she writes is either truth that only she knows, or a deliberate fabrication. It is not my place to say. Ultimately, she tells us, Levin sets out for the Far East eleven years after Boris Pilnyak. And why is his departure deemed to be “after” Boris Pilnyak’s? Because Levin brings Pilnyak’s book Roots of the Japanese Sun on the trip.†††† Yet he isn’t traveling to Japan! Ah, but he’s headed eastward. And besides, his choice is not so odd if one considers just how horrified people are at the time, bracing for tragedy after tragedy, wincing at every sound. The news of each new blow travels at lightning speed. So one day before his departure, the news of Boris Pilnyak’s arrest reaches even him, Doivber Levin, who matters to no one. Is it this news rather than geography that determined Levin’s choice of travel reading?
“The ever-present terror on the one hand, yet the hope that life might bring rescue in the form of a merciful reversal galvanized people to the point that the lives of many actually began to resemble the very thing they’d fancied in their wildest dreams. So it was, for instance, that David Burliuk,” Ferris writes, “the ‘futuristic Polyphemus,’ ‘father of Russian Futurism,’ trudged across the length of Siberia to Vladivostok, all in his secret mission to secure passage to America. With him he brought an entourage of six family members and friends. He vitalized Vladivostok cultural life bringing an unheard-of intensity, turning the provincial Far-Eastern city into the world capital of Futurism. Then in the 1920s he crossed over to Japan, where he became the ‘Russian father of Japanese Futurism.’ During his two years in Japan, he painted some three hundred canvases, turning the Japanese into lovers of Futurist antics, and during that time he saved enough money to move with his group of six to America; they flew straight to the epicenter of art, New York City.”
Doivber Levin arrives in Birobidzhan and immediately, as he knows Yiddish, is hired by the Bilobidzhaner Stern (an assertion which is impossible to deny, but also impossible to prove as two Levins and a Kaufman were, indeed, employed at the Bilobidzhaner Stern at the time), and finds work at the local Jewish theater staging performances ranging from Jewish classics to Jewish sketches adapted for the stage. Birobidzhan may be remote, but it is a lively region: after 1934 when it’s proclaimed the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, and Jews, communists, and communist sympathizers begin flocking there from other parts of the Soviet Union, but also from Argentina, Poland, America, and England, seeking a place more secure and protected than what they’ve left behind. Some stay on but others re-trace their steps, feeling cheated. Birobidzhan is hardly the promised land; the climate is challenging, the people are hungry, and their skills—merchants, tailors, bakers, butchers, woodworkers—are not, at first, of much value. Soon begins the Second World War, and with it men are drafted into the army: many of the people of Birobidzhan die in the war.
After but a few months in Birobidzhan, where he’d make friends with Miron Belochkin, actor and poet, he sets out for Harbin in Miron’s agreeable company. The two of them muddle along together for a time and then each chooses his own direction. Belochkin stays on in Harbin, seeking passage to America, while Levin goes on to Shanghai, a free city, where no one is inspecting passports or visas. He is there, in Shanghai, in 1938, when Jews from Germany begin arriving who’ve been unable to secure a visa for another country. The situation changes in 1939 when Shanghai is occupied by the Japanese. Levin is moved, with thousands of other Jews who arrive in Shanghai after 1937, to a part of the city called Hongkew, a Jewish ghetto. After the defeat of the Japanese, the Jews are briefly offered hospitality in Hong Kong and from there they emigrate to South and North America, the Soviet Union, Europe, Australia. The relocation does not go smoothly or speedily. Many spend the best years of their lives waiting for their new life.
And it is right here, while Doivber Levin is waiting for his papers to move to Europe, that Ferris comes to a stop. She stops on page ninety-nine. It’s unlikely that she realized the Angel No. 99 was staying her hand. Ferris leaves her hero, Doivber Levin, or BerDov Levi, or Boris Dov Kaufman, while he’s housed as a refugee at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. In the hotel room, on his bedside table, lies the manuscript of an unfinished novel. The novel is titled The Peninsula Hotel. Even a brief glance at the first sentences shows that Levin had matured into a sophisticated writer. Ferris seems certain, for whatever reason, that life, books, and perhaps even fame still await Doivber Levin. And before she shuts the door behind her, she slips into Levin’s jacket pocket a talisman for the road, the only one she can come up with: a few lines by Daniil Kharms.
Out of the house went a man
Out of the house he went
With a bindle tied to a stick.
And on a distant trek
And on a distant trek
Off he went on foot.
Straight along he walked and forward
Straight forward he gazed.
Not slept, nor drank,
Not drank, nor slept
Not slept, nor drank, nor ate.
Into a dark wood ventured he
In he strode one day, one dawn
From that moment
From that moment
From that moment he was gone.
If ever you should meet him
If the road should lead you on
Let us know now
Let us know now
Better now than anon.
8.
Foxes Are Loners
Asen Smirliev and I had been in touch only infrequently, but after reading the book I called him right away to thank him.
“Could you please send me Mrs. Ferris’s email address? I’d like to write her. I think she’d appreciate hearing from me,” I said.
“Regrettably, I cannot . . .”
“Why?”
Ira Ferris had died.
It happened not long after the conference where we’d met. She’d come to the conference to deliver her manuscript to him. He knew nothing more than what he’d heard from her twin sons, who’d come to England to see to the burial and settle her estate. Ira had been renting a room to a young woman, a student. That tragic day she saw the girl bein
g mobbed by a throng of young neighborhood men at the front door to her house, so she’d wheeled herself hastily to the front stoop, spun her wheelchair around at an awkward angle, and plunged down the stairs.
“Heavens, what a sad story!”
“And by the way, her sons said that the girl, Dora, who’d been staying with her, was apparently from Zagreb, a student at Goldsmiths . . .”
“So is Dora still living at the apartment?” I asked, dully.
“No, the sons sold the place.”
“Why is there no author bio in the book?”
“Ira preferred it that way . . .”
“And why is that?”
“I have no idea.”
I could readily imagine her little row house somewhere on the outskirts of South London. I could imagine her waiting impatiently every day for the student, clutching at the young woman like a straw, fearing that if she let go she’d sink, there’d be no more reason to breathe. The girl was hounded that evening by a pack of curs by the front stoop to the house, idle young men from the neighborhood on the prowl for a thrill. When Ferris saw what was happening from her perch by the window, she hastened to the front hall in her wheelchair, and, first switching on the light, she flung open the door. The boys froze. Ferris was a terrifying, raging sight, especially when she let loose a blood-curdling shriek. She even scared herself and wondered where she’d wrenched that inhuman sound from . . . A boy from the group grabbed a tennis ball from his pocket and slammed it into her, hard. Ferris wasn’t able to duck it or dodge, and, to make matters worse, in her panic she steered her wheelchair forward, tipped over, and tumbled down the stairs. The girl tore herself free, flew over to the old woman, first one neighbor came to his door, then another, then somebody called the police, the boys ran off . . .
Perhaps at the very moment of her death, Kharms’s verses opened wide before Ferris’s eyes: water and, on its surface, the image of the zero (Malevich’s zero!), a zero that really is a circle, just as a child tosses a pebble into a puddle and the pebble makes a circle that spreads across the surface of the water, each circle giving rise to a thought, and the thought, risen from the circle, “calls forth a zero from the dark to the light.”
Yet zero is the handiwork of God;
Zero is the kindred wheel;
Zero is the spirit and the body;
Boat, oar, and water . . .
Perhaps at the very moment of her death, Doivber Levin’s novel finally opened its pages for Ferris. She’d been staring into it her whole life as if into a hypnotic, black blot. The novel was truly dazzling, three-dimensional, its colors more vivid than any she’d ever known. She could see the apartment building in such sharp relief, each apartment lit by a bright light, and look! the mythical creature with the head of a bull and the ordinary Soviet official were next-door neighbors after all. The tenants were shuffled like cards, they were shining onto one another, literally; the color of one left its trace like a kiss on the hues of another; in the eye of the creature with the head of a bull slept the cowering figure of the Soviet official. And the proportions were skewed; a tiny woman sat on the rim of a flowerpot on a windowsill, swinging her legs and smoking. A little, bewhiskered man slept in one of the apartments, pressed against the fat body of a cockroach twice his size . . . Ira could hear voices, they were all talking at once, intertwining as if in some divine musical composition. And then the sounds bore her aloft as if on a sudden gust of wind (like Khlebnikov’s “Radio of the Future”) and off she flew. The marvelous house opened like a shell and drew her in. The feeling of displacement that had dogged her for her whole life was gone. She felt relief. She was finally home.
Or maybe that’s not how it happened. As I assembled the puzzle pieces and played at forensics, it occurred to me that Bulat Okudzhava’s Prayer must have been the soundtrack of her youth. In the final reckoning, she’d had something for everybody: her husband was able, thanks to her, to enjoy the quiet and gratifying career of a diligent verb-counter, counting verbs being what he most enjoyed. She loved her sons far more than they ever loved her. When she died, they sold her house and back they went to Australia with a sigh of relief. She’d looked after the girl, Dora, and, at least for a time felt close to her, the little “foreign girl,” so similar to what she’d been her whole life long. She watched over the girl, prayed to the Lord of Sea-Green Eyes to give the girl wisdom and strength: let the Lord of Sea-Green Eyes dole out a little of that to everyone, yes, and let him not forget her, Ira. She granted Doivber Levin a second life, sketched his biography, whether real or fictional, and acquitted the duty she’d been carrying forward since her birth at a certain time and a certain place. And as for herself, she allowed herself an inexpensive little outing. Her adventure might be termed the poetics of absence, the poetics of the holes in Swiss cheese, the poetics of the “divine zero” . . .
9.
Sprinklers
A month or two after Ferris’s book arrived at my address, I searched the internet for a review, any sign that somebody else had read it. Meanwhile, I googled Doivber Levin’s name, too. I received the same results I’d come up with before, but this time I clicked on one of the websites and, reflexively, pressed print. Only the next day did I remember to go and collect the printed text from the printer. Before I tossed it into the recycling bin, I just so happened, more by chance than intent, to cast an eye over the text. It was longer than I’d expected. I checked the website on my computer monitor. Everything was as it should be: Levin was born in such and such a year, wrote such and such texts, died at such and such a time. In the printed version, however, there were other sentences interspersed. These were not like the teeth of a comb fitting snugly into the teeth of another comb: they were not interlinked. The inserted text was gibberish, noise that impeded the flow of information. For example, after the sentence Doivber Levin enrolled at the university in Petrograd in 1922 was interposed the sentence How remarkable that Spider-Man knew nothing of this. And while these two could, theoretically, be linked (the second offering an amusing commentary on the first), the sentences that followed were gibberish. I tried finding some connection between the website and the gibberish, a hidden message, but to no avail, the sentences were fragments from unraveled texts, nothing was linkable to anything else. The last sentence was Even Anastasia Stotskaya couldn’t imagine such a thing. I hoped this might be a quote from a novel or hid a riddle of some sort. I was persuaded otherwise when I ascertained that Anastasia Stotskaya was not a fictional character, but a momentarily popular Russian star.
I ran my anti-viral program, but my computer appeared to be clean. I called a few acquaintances, but none of them had ever heard of such a thing. One did suggest that what I was seeing was an earlier version that had attached itself to the main text: revisions are usually hidden from view on the monitor, but because of a computer error they were showing up in the print-out. “A routine glitch,” said my acquaintance.
Nothing I said could convince him that these were not revisions I’d made to the text, nor that the glitch was at all “routine.” It had never happened before, but I had no will to go on researching, especially because a fantastical notion had occurred to me and captured my imagination.
What if texts, imprinted on infinitesimal, transparent layers with hidden text, are overlaid one atop the other, yet we know nothing of them because they remain permanently hidden from view, and only very occasionally, as with the Doivber Levin website, do they appear to the computer user in readable form? What if there are many of these “adhered” layers, which our eye is not capable of perceiving? What if the texts are, in fact, linked to one another, but we haven’t the skill we’d need to grasp their coherence? And what if we human beings are actually living, breathing texts? What if we’re walking around with myriad overlays of “revisions” of ourselves about which we know nothing? What if the blurbs about other people (one, two, a thousand?) are “attached” to us, yet we are unaware of their existence? What if these texts fuse to us; what if w
e all, each and every one of us, has been inhabited by secret dwellers? Why did I get so stuck ages ago on that utterly inconsequential footnote about Doivber Levin? Why did Ferris spend all her time on Levin? Which was it? Did Ferris dream her text about Levin, or did the text about Levin dream Ferris?
Whatever the case, Ferris’s fascination with Levin’s biography could simply be explained by the way she perceived her own life as a footnote appended to a text rather than as a text in its own right; because of her sense of her own second-class status she wrapped herself around equally “second-class” Doivber Levin, warming it, the footnote that is, with her breath as if it were a frozen bird. Is her “restoration” of Levin’s biography credible? I can’t even say that. I know only that it’s plausible. It is entirely possible that things are less exalted than we might imagine, that Doivber Levin is, indeed, Irina Ferris’s real father. Perhaps Ferris knew of her father’s existence, or perhaps she adopted Levin as a make-believe father; maybe the “pretty Komsomol girl” who had the powerful weapon, the stamps, was, indeed, her mother. Lest we forget, L. Panteleev, Levin’s compatriot, jotted down a few words in his diary after meeting with Doivber Levin, musing: I wonder where his daughter Ira is now. How old could she be? Seven?
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