Then the general let off another slam of his fist on the table. All the plates and glasses jumped.
“I disapprove of these statements,” he formulated, as if delivering a report to Central Command. “You have eaten and drunk at this table. How can you deny your friendship with Hussein?”
(Hussein, the Assyrian scribe. Who was me. More or less accurately. The general had christened me with a generic foreign name, in the sense that I was any old common-garden Ivan.)
“Ask Hussein to forgive you,” he demanded.
Maarif, red with shame, took a moment for introspection and found himself replete with champagne and caviar consumed at my expense. Whereupon he promptly delivered himself of a second discourse, this one of repentance for all the countries the IMPERIUM had dragged into the abyss, my own included. Finally, no longer knowing how else to erase his guilt, he praised my Russian. “You speak Russian very well”—which meant I had managed to open the doors of the Rus and could leave behind the steppe, the nameless distances that belong to those who are mute (those who explain themselves in an unintelligible language, a language of mutes), the sea and the lands beyond the sea, and enter the chosen kingdom of world renewal. Slavophilia. Russian exceptionalism. The Russian Third Way. Maarif wanted to reduce that whole vast task to the salvation of LINDA’S lone, imperiled soul.
I. Dinner was over. RUDI, who now took me for little less than a desert sheikh, bent down next to my ear, his aching hand clutching the lapel of his double-breasted jacket, his lips moist: “You should go south, to YALTA. A lot of casinos have opened there. The season has just begun.”
I
IMPERIUM. Captives in the IMPERIUM, its prisoners felt nevertheless as if they were galloping in full freedom across unlimited space: men and women in their natural habitat with no barbed wire or alarm system in sight. The IMPERIUM was a parallel world, a self-sufficient universe that included its own “globetrotters,” fully deserving of the title, who, even so, had never left it. The other world—the OCCIDENT, Africa, the Fiji Isles—seemed to belong to a past accessible only through books or films that appeared to emerge from nowhere. It was perceived as a far distant future or a remote history (a purely academic interest in the Sumerian maritime arts); in the present it was nonexistent.
I. In this partial analysis of the IMPERIUM, I shall focus on the following aspects:
a) Destiny
b) Fear
c) Mortal danger
a) Destiny. Russia, the great country that constituted the nucleus of the IMPERIUM, possesses a universal destiny that is the sum of all individual destinies. The topside or visible portion of this great destiny, this ineluctable Russian destiny, makes its way like an icebreaker through the frozen armor-plating of the years, leaving behind a jagged wake of truncated lives. The currents of this destiny come from very far and cross through the IMPERIUM’S lives like fossilized radiation left over from the Big Bang. And these narrative threads, invisible and inescapable, are destiny. Everyone is crisscrossed by these lines of force, fate’s ultrapowerful magnet, drawing them to their death. With room for small fluctuations, fruitlessly heroic efforts, the world as will and representation, and other such trivialities that bother us only when we’re young, after which, tired of rowing against the shifting tides of destiny, we extend our arms in a cross and float painlessly.
Russia (or the IMPERIUM) is struggling against its destiny, but the shadow of this fatalism pursues it. Many historic dates can be adduced to confirm the certainty of its predestination. Hence there is no increase in human morality nor absolute progress, but only the infallible pincer lowered from the sky which, from among the panicked and fleeing multitude—unaware that the danger does not exist for them—selects the idiot seminarian, with his bangs and wire-rimmed glasses, for its appalling fulmination, without motive, without cause, without delivering any verdict.
Destiny makes use of blind executors of its will who, as such, merit our comprehension more than our contempt. Russia is an old country and there one breathes the frozen air of multiple histories that bear out this theory of destiny. They know it and that’s enough. They go out into the snow barefoot to face the firing squad’s nine spurts of flame: merely the means chosen by destiny to send a concise message of utmost importance.
b) Fear. I’ve jerked the strings of small fears—my cruel half-smile—without knowing I was being watched on high by the omnipresent pupil from which all the underlying fear irradiates, and I have felt vertigo when I raised my eyes and discovered that fact. Each person’s performance as the petty tyrant of our own tiny realm is a necessary movement of the soul, a display, a rattling of chains. Whether we like it or not, an icy wind blows from the Hesperides, inhumanly. Like God himself, fear is given a name and endowed with the limbs and torso of a state institution; this fear accumulates in the multiple guises of jails, the secret police, ministerial directives—only a few of the many incarnations of its absolute being.
This latent terror binds every organic compound; it can be found in all of them just as oxygen is found in chains of carbon. You are fear and something else, anything else. And through this intermediary, the inhabitants of the IMPERIUM enter into reaction, they function, agitating their blind pod-limbs and secreting the hard coral efflorescences of the State, which are interlaced with fear.
Though fear cements the imposing fabric of the IMPERIUM, life under the dominion of this fear is ethereal and unreal. Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны. (We live without feeling the country beneath our feet. Mandelstam.) The man who has experienced the terror of hearing his own guilty name shouted out in a formation loses faith; his image in the mirror dissolves and he closes his eyes and listens in anguish to the thud of the hobnailed boots as they come to a halt before him. I’ve discovered once-beautiful souls deformed by the abyssal pressures of the IMPERIUM, the unfathomable sea where they live out their one-celled lives. Hence the HAM’S violent tempests, the ravages of AQUA VITAE.
The divinity of fear gazes down upon the lamentable tableau of the IMPERIUM and smiles in satisfaction from its celestial box seat.
c) Mortal danger. The enthusiasm generated by the IMPERIUM shortly before its collapse was the nervous grin, the last dying hope of the hunted man who, corralled at the edge of the abyss and about to be devoured by the monster, sees it stop short in wonder over the flutter of a passing butterfly, a sight that attenuates the fury in its eyes and creases the blue skin of its formless snout into a human grimace. In the brief instant of the miracle, the prey has a moment to give thanks to God, reevaluate the monster’s perversity (“No, you’re not bad, it was the years of isolation, the terrible conditions, I knew the change would come, I had faith in you”), and sidestep the monster’s charge. Once on safe ground, shielded by an overhang, the escapee shouts the truth to the monster and spends all necessary funds to capture it, so as never to have to put the goodness of its nature to the test again.
INDIGO (the color). Lying back on my deck chair, the red PACKARD parked only a few meters from an intensely blue sea, I devote myself to studying the golden glints in the air churned by the bronze thighs of women emerging from the water. Seeing them, I thought of a superb slogan for a brand of shampoo or conditioner: “Mientras por competir con tu cabello, / oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano . . .” a line from Góngora that could have been put to excellent use by Vidal Sassoon, the celebrated California hairstylist: “A rival to your hair, the sun / flashes on burnished gold in vain . . .” The bathers were advancing with that special clumsiness of terra firma, sirens dragged to shore by the sea to exhibit their magnificent colors, their backs treated with vitamin-fortified creams, their taut bellies, visually centered by the dark point of the navel: ideal graphic statements for the great cover photos of the nineties which, dreamed up in distant international centers, reached every beach in the world with the mandatory force of a ministerial directive. For a second, I imagined an impossible collision between the motley decor of the beach before me an
d that same bathing resort at the beginning of the century, its sepia tones entirely incompatible with this pure indigo. The terror those beige ladies would feel if confronted by the color pale TTE OF THESE VERY BLONDE GIRLS, ALL OF THEM FORMER KOMSOMOL MEMBERS, DELIVERING CARELESS KICKS TO BEACH BALLS THAT WERE VERY RED AND BLUE AND YELLOW. Full, vivid colors, straight out of a magazine printed on expensive coated stock; the metallic glitter, the fine film that overlay their human souls with the finish of an industrial product, the high sheen of an inanimate object that the hard gazes of certain fashion models seek to copy, the distant bearing, the contrived expression. Already we were being blinded by the first flashes of the neon look with its tremendous artificiality, and those girls on the beach, made up in indelible lipsticks and pencils, were all resolved in an infra-human gamut of color, cruel mannequins. As for me, educated by long years of watching a multichromatic Trinitron TV, I observed them without any particular astonishment, taking note of the season’s colors, those “natural” tones we believe have been captured documentarily when we leaf through a fashion magazine or go to the movies. Perhaps you are unaware that it was French couturiers who, in the wake of World War I, imposed the fashion for tanning and spread the fallacy of its healthful effects? Nowadays you’d do well to wonder whether the vivid, blinding yellow of this sun is the same as it always was; perhaps it was launched two seasons ago by an influential fashion house, a “canary yellow” sun, “very youthful”—or whether the greens of the palm trees were “Panzer green” or “Chevalier green.” And, of course, for a very long time now we’ve had a blue that is “Prussian.” Prosit!
INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. At the end of 1989, I left for the OCCIDENT via Berlin. It was the quickest way to the kingdom of heaven, the only place in the IMPERIUM where the nerves of that other organism were just beneath the skin’s surface, just beyond the wall. When the delicate membrane gave way and the two bloods intermingled, Romanian gypsies, Mongols, Bulgarians, Slovaks, and Croats all hurled themselves through the breach: all those who, in the depths of the IMPERIUM, felt the sudden diminution of pressure in their swim bladders and came racing in myriads and droves to prosper in this new ocean.
But in 1989 we were also moving through the prehistory of the amassment of fortunes, the initial accumulation, devoid of Victorian sideburns or the tedious 3 percent per annum. There was oil in Western Siberia, emeralds in the Urals, diamonds in Yakutia, all of them affaires of such powerful magnetism that even if you approached them timidly, thousands of kilometers from the golden epicenter, you could become rich between nightfall and dawn.
I needed money; this was the principal correlative to my discovery in the (CHINESE) PALACE, the half-sphere indispensable to achieving the critical mass of full frivolity. I went to West Berlin with several kilos of Caspian caviar smuggled in jam pots. (I’m not ashamed to confess this: I had endured long five-year plans in the IMPERIUM, subjected to inhuman budgets of a few rubles per month.) I invested the earnings from that sale in renting a small room and found myself a job washing dishes in a bar: the astonishing automatic dishwasher there, a beautiful and useful machine; the illusion of doing easy work, which in fact was not easy at all. Now I know that I was running the risk of losing my way in a labyrinth of petty expenses where I might have wandered for years, stumbling in the darkness against unpaid invoices and excessively high prices. But one evening, there in the kitchen of that bar, I read a headline in the Berliner Zeitung sticking up from the cook’s jacket pocket. I plucked it out with my damp fingers. The great news, thanks to which I am here today telling you this story, sipping this 1935 Massandra here in YALTA. (Waiter, please . . . Perfect.)
Verkauf, Inkauf. Easy to decipher. Verkauf im summer . . . A plan to auction off quite a bit of pretty decent East German merchandise. To clear kilometers of shelves in preparation for the Bundesrepublik’s great leap forward. All the department stores of Dresden, Potsdam and Karl-Marx-Stadt up for sale. For ridiculously low prices! I sat down to ponder the news. The sound of glasses clinking and customers laughing reached me from the bar: workers and small property owners, perhaps a few professionals. Nobodies, in a word, with their small monthly incomes. I went outside, crossed the street, and went into the bar that was opposite. I stayed there for an hour, looking at the buildings, at this other bar. All this could be mine!
And so, well, I managed it. Because I was in on the secret: I knew that to make money, to grow rich, was a virtue. I had passed through the straits of Marxism and rediscovered a simplicity that was Adamic (in the Smithean sense), an excellent theoretical grounding for a more fitting use of the ABACUS. Listen: All systems, either of preference or restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as soon as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in his own way, and to bring both his industry and his capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men. We’re saved! I managed to divert the contents of some Leipzig stores into the depths of Eurasia. That was all. Since then, I’ve chartered airplanes from Southwest Asia, cargo ships full of goods from China.
“Products from Turkey? I’ve heard there’s a real glut of Turkish merchandise.”
“No, Chinese merchandise.” (The silk route: Bukhara and Samarkand.)
J
JOSIK, JOSHELE, JOSEPH. We sat down next to the windows overlooking the plaza. I said to LINDA, “This is where you exclaim ‘I’ve never seen such a luxurious place before!’”
She glanced up from the menu. “Are you sure you have the money for this?”
“LINDA, I spent more than a year amassing the capital for this novel, thinking about a restaurant like this one (or even finer) and a redheaded girl like you. The budget for the dinner scene is more than adequate, as you’ll see. It’s only eight p.m. We’re just getting started.”
LINDA said, “I want to write you a letter.”
As if instead of a white tablecloth between us there were kilometers of arid landscape, desert dunes. She insisted. “There are some things I want to tell you.”
She wanted to gaze directly into my eyes via the immediacy that only epistolary communication can confer. Allow me to introduce here the first one she wrote that night.
Her first letter, as if from afar.
Hello JOSIK:
This morning I’d been having intense thoughts about a bag of oranges. It’s been about half a year since I’ve eaten an orange. When you told me about your plan, I thought you’d be able to buy lots of them. I don’t mean that was the only reason I agreed to go along with you, but sometimes I dream about baskets brimming over with oranges. I would go to Morocco just for the oranges. From any port on the Black Sea we’d be there in five days. We could also eat our fill of bananas. You grew up surrounded by fruit, that’s why you’re such a good person. I realized this when we were strolling through the garden. I suffer from vitamin deficiencies in the spring; my gums bleed. Even my hair loses its shine. Your teeth are good, too, like a movie star’s. We’ll make a very good couple in Crimea. I like your plan more and more. Thanks to which I remembered oranges.
Bye.
Nastia
I. The morning after our dinner at the Astoria, Maarif brought me a second letter from LINDA. She never explained why she was writing me again so soon. Apparently Maarif had made a jealous scene, which she brought to a close by punishing him with the task of serving as messenger boy between us. (And thus, after the vulgar fashion of a vulgar love triangle, was the plot thickening.)
Her second letter was full of lies.
Hello JOSHELE:
I have to tell you the truth about my nose. My real last name is Katz. I had a grandfather named Kats or Katz who went to America to make his fortune . . .
It couldn’t be true! My pursuit of SOSHA’S Hebrew tresses had brought me directly to a Katz! He was from LVOV: Bruno Schulz, Sholem Aleichem, an une
xpected twist. I continued reading: . . . came back ten years later and without so much as going home to give his children a kiss went to the VILLAGE tavern and spent eight hours there, not once stepping outside for a breath of air. He gambled away all his savings at cards, and then, with nothing else to wager, his house. That same morning, before day had dawned, someone killed him out of pity. He didn’t have enough years of life left to go back to Chicago and save up the money to pay that debt. My grandmother nailed an ace of spades to the coffin and paid two gypsies to lead the funeral procession, throwing out playing cards to the crowd. It was a terrible vengeance. When I think that a quarter of my blood is Hebrew . . .
Oh, for God’s sake, only a quarter . . . But her lovely story was false. She had invented it to mortify Maarif and solidify her relations with me, a foreigner. As if to say: “Look, I’ve stolen lots of things.” She was going to YALTA with me; that was what I gathered from this message. Her decision was irrevocable and she had chosen this extravagant means of conveying it to me.
K
K**. She had the translucent skin of a nocturnal animal. And the way she walked: as if she were trying to steal into the enemy camp, find the silken tent of the sleeping khan, and plunge the silver-handled dagger into his chest. I preferred her to other women because she looked straight into the depths of existence and would formulate questions that were as clear and hard as blocks of ice. Would I be capable of killing someone in order to steal, of killing in cold blood? Clean interrogations, straight from a mind that spun in the void, entirely uncontaminated by any practical matter. She evaluated the possibility of taking drugs or committing suicide in the same way. When we were traveling through Central Asia, I knew she was fully capable of stepping off any train at any unknown stop and disappearing into the STEPPE. I, lying on my cot, the train already back underway, gazing out at the scorched grass in stupefaction.
Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Page 6
