Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  But after my visit to the (CHINESE) PALACE, I developed a new organ to help me navigate the clean, clear waters of a full life. I acquired a vision that could reveal in sharp focus the secret components of that state of freedom. Something like the heightened perceptions of the hypochondriac who every morning lends an anguished ear to the arrhythmic beating of his own heart and discovers a new ache, a persistent sharp pain in the side . . . Still half asleep and in a bad mood, I jumped out of bed into an uncertain future in 198*. I went into the bathroom, chewed mechanically on the toothbrush, and was shaken by a sign of jubilation that shot through my nervous centers at lightning speed. My God! It was that magnificent toothpaste I’d bought the day before. I felt better and more confident, my mouth overflowing with foam. I stared straight into my own eyes in the mirror.

  Spacodent was the name of one of those FLUORIDATED toothpastes.

  I. Frivolity attacked the carbonic chains of the IMPERIUM with all the force reduction of FLUORIDE. The IMPERIUM, which had projected its considerable plantigrade weight into the distance of a perfect future, collapsed under the pressure of purebred dogs, the once impossible dream of Jaguar convertibles and soft Persian carpets, undermined by the new goal of a pleasant way of life that, over time, had managed to replace all its celestial objectives. It had been at least five years since anyone wore one of those awful striped neckties. That is: a profound antagonism had become apparent between the quietism of the Doctrine and the dizzying scandal of disposable diapers: between the search for a future kingdom of truth on this earth and the “general line” of the century, which was to consume the present and consider the future no more than a mental construct. The peoples held captive by the IMPERIUM peered out into the dark night, afloat on a warm sea awash in delightful detritus, to watch the illuminated ship that was the permanent carnival of the OCCIDENT coming toward them, and they heaved a collective, pensive sigh. “Yes, it’s in a state of decay, no doubt, but how good it smells!”

  THELONIOUS: To believe that the IMPERIUM fell for purely economic reasons is to commit the sin of pedestrian materialism and ignore the teachings of Weber. I’ve meditated at length on the phenomenon of hits on the RADIO. For anyone not in on the secret, it turns out to be very difficult to assay the strength of a hit, its devastating effects. A song that is trivial—or musically impoverished, which amounts to the same thing—can come to have greater social resonance than a manifesto, but this influence is surreptitious, masked. The effect on the Doctrine is that of a stealth bomb that imperceptibly changes mentalities, distorting or adulterating our ineluctable responsibility to do something, become something, be useful. The influence of the hit is called “ideological deviation” or “ideological penetration.” A very apt name, for in reality what occurs is a kind of invasion by osmosis of the minds of people who want only to love, suffer, be successful, and live comfortably in a well-defined present moment between a yesterday and a tomorrow.

  You might say there’s no reason why this should enter into any sort of contradiction with the Doctrine of the Distant Morrow. Nevertheless, the latter ideology is predicated on a kind of asceticism, a life whose every sphere is political, which, in the final analysis, does not deny the earthly delights (which are even encouraged, very timidly, by its ideologues) but places a single great objective ahead of them. Two or three hits, the latest style, the irresponsibility of youth, enter into open conflict with these postulates (giving rise to the so-called “ideological struggle”). Youth, breezy afternoons, a generous portion of some delicious frozen concoction (VANILLA ICE cream, for example), demand a here and now that is thrilling, exultant, danceable.

  FOREST, CONIFEROUS (see: BOSCAGE).

  G

  GREAT GATSBY, THE. In the bottomless sea of the IMPERIUM’S former capital, a few islets of prosperity had lowered their anchors: full-fledged OCCIDENTAL boutiques, red and fluorescent. In front of one such establishment a few curious passersby were pointing to dresses that were very lovely and very expensive (like the gowns of Catherine the Great in the Hermitage, also behind glass: crinolines whose taffeta silk was very old and very distant) and, good Lord, ties that cost $30, an entire month’s salary at current exchange rates, knotted at the collar of shirts made of printed silk—the last cry that year—which also seemed very old because they belonged to an inaccessible present. It looked like the window of a cabinet of wonders, PETER’S Kuntzkamera: a mammoth tusk exhibited alongside a magnificent electric dishwasher.

  I hadn’t told LINDA I planned to buy her a dress for that night’s dinner. She thought we were only stopping to admire the display. (Oh, yes, she’d seen leggings like these once before—lycra they call it—in a mail-order catalog!)

  LINDA wanted to try on a dress that was very beautiful and very expensive, just to see how she looked. It suited her marvelously.

  “It suits you marvelously. Have I mentioned that we’re having dinner at the Astoria tonight?”

  At last LINDA understood the scope of my plan. She was speechless, then asked me uncertainly, “Do you think anyone might take it the wrong way, because I accepted your proposition so quickly? It’s a novel, isn’t it?”

  “It’s silk, the very latest style, and it suits you marvelously.”

  I. The doorman at the Astoria shot me a frosty look. It was his job to find young ladies for the guests’ entertainment and he was annoyed at losing my business. As we crossed the lobby several men noticed the threadbare jeans worn by the beauty on my arm and the large prominently labeled bag that I carried, with our purchases inside, and thus were educated in how to win young lady friends for themselves. I followed LINDA along the carpeted hallway, entirely surrendering to the measured waltz of her hips, her backlit red hair.

  In silence, LINDA studied the magnificent copies in oil, the 1905 furniture, the Art Nouveau chandelier dangling from the ceiling.

  “Isn’t all this far too expensive just for a novel?”

  “I’ve told you: I have ample funds at my disposition. I’ve been saving up for a long time and thinking about a redheaded girl like you. Look, I’ll show you the shirts I’ve bought, all made of silk. Or no, this will give you a better idea.”

  We went over to the table where my open laptop lay.

  “This computer cost me a great deal, and then there’s the SCANNER, too. You don’t know what a SCANNER is? It’s a device that allows you to introduce texts directly into your computer without having to key them in. Very convenient since I’ve brought along a whole library. I’ll show you how it works. Could you get that book down for me? The one I was leafing through this morning? Look here.”

  Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets, which held his massed suits and dressing gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

  “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season: spring and fall.”

  He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

  “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such, such beautiful shirts before.”

  “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a new technology.”

  “Yes, in a sense. You’re right. What more can I show you?”

  H

  HAND AX (топóР). The leafy BOSCAGES of Moscow: VILLAGES and monasteries depicted in vertical perspective. Monks who penetrate this verdant grove and piece together the first Muscovite kingdom with blows of massive woodsman’s axes and б�
�з единого гвоздя (without a single nail). We are accustomed to viewing the AX as a tool for woodcutters. In Russia, however, there is always a HAND AX within a radius of five meters, at arm’s length; they’re as common as bread knives. The AX represents brutality, the не обтесанные (rough-hewn) side of the Russian soul. RASKOLNIKOV kills the pawnbroker and Lizveta with an AX. We know from Gogol that during HARD FROSTS VILLAGE idiots left shreds of their tongues on its cold metal. It may strike us as rather uncomfortable (and in fact, is), but the good Russian who has resolved to take matters to their ultimate consequences brandishes one of these and strikes, with no fear of the effusion of blood. The AX, as we noted earlier, represents the irrational, an animal terror. A.A. expressed it perfectly:

  Fear stirs among the things in my dark room,

  a ray of moonlight shatters on the blade of an AX.

  HAM (XАМ). Both a son of Noah and a blasphemous oath.

  (And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. Genesis 9: 20–22, King James Version.)

  In the Russian language, HAM is a self-sufficient word, a Hammer of Hams. I once observed an incident in which an individual muddied the quiet stream of a retiree’s pleasant stroll and the wronged party turned, terrible and full of rage, and SPAT “HAM, HAM, HAM!” over and over at the HAM, defining him, singularizing him, putting the handcuffs on him, preparing him to be caged and subjected to public derision.

  When you go out into the street, you may at any moment witness the beginning of legendary HAM sessions. (THELONIOUS MONK in New Orleans, the night he sent out for the only drum kit, had it brought to him across the sleeping city.) Old men and young ladies do not cease to whisper the accusatory apostrophe in a rage, hissing it out left and right.

  I. To behave rudely in Moscow is almost to show a kind of deference to the victim of the aggression; it is to allude to a human quality that is out of the ordinary, a capacity for understanding that is distinct and Christian. Someone has shouted at you, and he is the bad guy, the HAM, but (and herein lies the great challenge) are you not able to forgive him? And everyone, all well experienced in this particular spiritual gymnastics, forgives everyone else, mutually, for their terrible fits of rage.

  In a café we summoned the waiter to ask for TEA and had to wait half an hour for him to appear. When he did, he was highly annoyed, for we had failed to grasp that his activity as a café waiter was purely a masquerade, a job he was performing only to remain in close proximity to some secret chamber of speculation. He took our order with the demeanor of a king mingling incognito with the commoners who discovers, to his displeasure, that in addition to wearing the apron and carrying the pencil behind the ear—both indispensible elements of the disguise—he must also run from kitchen to dining room, take down orders, and endure the complaints of the clientele. All his wrath fell upon us for we continued to insist that he bring us clean eating implements and thereby won for ourselves the black hatred of that waiter, the HAM.

  HARD FROSTS. Covered in rime, the leafless trees, their branches sketched against a sky dense as sea water. Numb with cold, we moved in silence as if this were a bed of coral and we the mute school of fish interminably shooting to and fro.

  I’ve been scuba diving at a depth of three meters and it was exactly like this; the ice crystals sparkling in the air are the spots of light that pierce through the water’s mass to dapple the seabed covered in coral, which is what trees look like at 32 degrees below zero (centigrade).

  I. “This morning when I went downstairs to shake out the carpets, I realized immediately that we must be very far below zero because my eyelashes grew heavy with a coating of ice. It happened in a single blink.”

  I’ve opted for this detail about the eyelashes to give you a precise idea of the cold. (The real India, a writer—Nabokov—tells us, reveals itself in the green mildew that blooms on a pair of shoes left outside for the night.) I was in the garden, beneath white trees, and had to melt the frost off my eyelashes with the heat of my fingers. I have no such personal detail with which to illustrate life in the freezing barracks (I was shaking out the rugs as an exercise, enjoying the iridescent swirl of ice crystals): the slavering pack of dogs that rip straight through your padded trousers or the sweet indifference of dying from cold and inanition, the unfathomable abyss of an undeserved prison sentence, the appalling discovery that there’s been no mistake whatsoever, only the refined absurdity that is the total absence of any system, the pullulating chaos beneath an apparent order, the millions of dead and your single concrete death (a pair of boots covered in mildew).

  II. At last, in 1991, we learned that Óсип Эмльевич Мандельштáм (Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam) died in February of 1937 and that his body was piled along with others in a shed, where it remained until spring. An entirely apolitical piece of data: a destiny.

  HIPPOLYTE. Just as RUDI began serving the truffled salmon, a violent thunderstorm erupted. Heavy raindrops beat against the windows. I stood up, for I needed to collect the gusts of water and the hooded sky’s varied hues of gray. LINDA began to give me the news, then broke off: “It’s raining, as you see . . .”

  I nodded. It was ten p.m. and still light outside. It was raining—I could see that perfectly well for myself—but what else was going on? She held her hand out and touched the tips of my fingers. Something was making her anxious.

  “I hope you won’t take this too badly. I’ll be right back.”

  She shot through the door in a whirlwind. I glanced at Rudi, the chorus of this Greek tragedy against whom all our dialogue rebounded, but he didn’t seem to know the source of LINDA’S sudden disquiet either. Was it the rain? Did she have white clothes hung out to dry on a balcony?

  Five minutes later she was back, pulling young Maarif along by the hand. “He was going to catch cold out in the rain,” she said. My soul plunged to the bottom of my feet. He had been waiting for her the whole time in the plaza. He would wait there, kneeling on the pavement, hatless and shivering with cold. I repeated his name in a low voice, “Maarif,” trying to find some explanation for his conduct. What was more, with a friend like that, LINDA was dangerous, capable of standing at the altar before an open Bible and then escaping in a sleigh pulled by fiery steeds through the driving snow and the wind’s eternal ululation. Which would cut short my novel.

  No, I had nothing against allowing Maarif to join our party. “RUDI, set another place for Maarif.”

  Maarif was wearing his Cossack overcoat, doing his bit for the awakening of the national consciousness. He hung it from a hook on the wall and I watched the water drip from it, the steam that rose from its folds.

  LINDA wrote me a short letter about Maarif. “Maarif is a Persian name or something like that. But he’s Russian. He’s the one who explained all those terrible things to me, about the Elders of Zion . . .”

  I raised my eyes and fixed them on this young man: the clear, exalted face of one who has been granted access to a unique truth. He remained silent through most of the meal. Just before midnight, he summoned RUDI and said, so that everyone else could hear: “Tell me when it’s midnight.”

  RUDI answered somewhat abrasively, “That won’t be necessary; we close at midnight, unless we’re paid a supplementary fee.” (RUDI addressed him like that out of annoyance at the tone of his order; he was very intelligent for a mere waiter, but Maarif was too young to understand that.)

  Half an hour later RUDI went over to Maarif and whispered something. I consulted my watch. Maarif leapt to his feet, prepared to unmask me.

  (The same scene in F.M.’s Идиот [The Idiot]: the young man who wants to settle accounts with the world and offer up the irrefutable proof of a vermilion stain on the tablecloth. This was what happened: HIPPOLYTE, his left hand holding the glass of champagne, had plunged his right hand in
to his coat pocket. Keller afterward declared that HIPPOLYTE had that same hand in his pocket earlier, as he was talking to Myshkin, whom he embraced with his left arm—which was, Keller said, what first awoke his suspicions. Be that as it may, some vague uneasiness made him run to HIPPOLYTE’S side. But he was too late. He only just glimpsed an object shining in HIPPOLYTE’S right hand and realized immediately that a small pocket pistol was pressed against the young man’s temple.)

  “Nastia!” Maarif shouted to LINDA to penetrate her consciousness, which was somewhat impaired by the champagne. “The terrible thing, the worst thing of all, is that this guy doesn’t have a kopeck, he’s an imposter, a PSEUDO DEMETRIUS.”

  The fearsome accusation. I wanted to cut his wings before he rose much higher.

  “The terrible thing, the worst thing of all, is that I have a great deal of money indeed! And I’m ready to spend it all on LINDA!”

  My reply took him by surprise. He stopped short (pebbles still rolling beneath his feet) and gulped for air. He went on. “Why should we believe you? I, too, could organize a feast like this one if I wished, but that’s the thing: I don’t want to.”

  I was wounded by his total incomprehension. I had confessed my plan to him—all that the reader now knows—in the belief that he would grasp my purpose. But he had heard me out with the smile of an experienced practitioner who prefers not to contradict a patient who is visibly mad. I let him carry on (“Why should we believe you?” et cetera).

  “When I saw you this morning along the canal, near the cathedral, I knew you immediately for one of those pathetic foreigners who put on airs of grandeur. I met one who wanted to be called the King of Suomi. He talked about renting a Navy helicopter to show me Petersburg as the crow flies. He never kept his promise . . . In Helsinki there are at least three thousand plumber kings like this guy here. As long as we have foreigners eating and drinking in our restaurants, seducing our women, the Russian muzhik will never be able . . .” and Maarif SPAT, irate.