Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  A graphic solution that suggests the ephemeral life of the many books that will receive lukewarm reviews in the Times Literary Supplement this month, only to return, a week later, to their virtual existence in the depths of the computer, like deep-sea fish that appear on the surface for their brief hour then dive back down to be fed into the shredders where the unsold copies go. It wouldn’t pain me if, once consulted, my ENCYCLOPEDIA were to be forgotten on the luggage rack of a commuter train. In fact, such a fate would be marvelously well suited to the philosophy underlying this ENCYCLOPEDIA. I would like for it to be sold at the magazine stands of the world’s great train stations, where its resemblance to Vogue would confound the bored passenger: the Harper’s Bazaar we find on a chair in the waiting room of an international airport that stays with us all the way to Capetown.

  These are the multivalent graphic gems we will hand down to posterity. Essentially the same as those incunabula by Fiodorov, the first Russian typographer. In fact, when we get to Nice, I will personally take charge of the task of printing and binding it. Thirty copies to be given out to friends, as if it were a printed book and not a manuscript—a distinction that’s about to disappear in our headlong return to the origins. It’s very simple; my computer already has a fantastic arsenal of fonts.

  II. As you already know, I disapprove of the text’s independence from its material support. Though here, too, we’re on the verge of going beyond—or rather, we’ve already left behind—the domain of printed paper. Let’s think, rather, of one of those books printed on . . . No, better to say engraved with a laser on a photosensitive emulsion, the CD version of this same ENCYCLOPEDIA. (And of course its organization into entries, or voces, is no more than an old-fashioned mechanical simulation, on paper, of one of those new books available on CD.) Where does such a book begin, its beauty? In the fascinating litmus of a strange plaque we hold up to our eyes, seeking to discover beneath its mirroring surface, the signs, typefaces, and symbols we’re accustomed to? For it contains a text we cannot manage to see, forms we do not succeed in imagining. Are these books, then? Can they be described as such? Where are the hard covers, the thin paper, the gilded edges, all the exquisite work of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the jewel designed by Morris that I promised to show you? I’ll give you an example: do you believe that any trace of the hourglass can be detected in the pale green blink of seconds upon the liquid crystal? Books disappear the same way. We learn to rejoice in the lightness of the polyvinyl plaque, admiring its slenderness. Eventually we forget about the pleasing heft of coated paper.

  N

  NERUS (нерусь). “Young man,” the duchess—every bit as xenophobic as Maarif—proffered in alarm, “you’re quite mistaken!” Turning to me, after carefully removing the expression of complicity from her face, she added, “Forgive him. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  But the pure falsity of her face belied her words; she hadn’t gone to great effort to conceal the true feelings that surged within her, yet imagined she could deceive me by her clumsy maneuver, just as, controlling our rage with great difficulty, we attempt a smile and stroke the crew-cut head of a child, wanting all the while to give him a good slap. What had moved the duchess to intercede was like-mindedness. She pooh-poohed Maarif’s accusations here, but would have proclaimed her adherence to them without a moment’s hesitation if this were a street rally for the cause. These were ideas that must not be announced in the public realm before the time was ripe. “Pay no attention to him,” she repeated, convinced, moreover, that I hadn’t grasped even half of his peroration, which had been delivered in Russian, “the richest and most difficult language in the world.”

  Sometimes the anonymous housewives of whom the duchess reminded me would shout some instruction into your ear, which you understood perfectly the first time you heard it but opted, for whatever reason, not to carry out right away. Then they would say to each other, “I’m speaking to him in Russian and he doesn’t understand me.” Or else I might be talking with a friend in a public place and a woman, taking us perhaps for NERUS (non-Russians, representatives of one of the IMPERIUM’S national minorities), would grow indignant: “Hey, why don’t you speak Russian? You’ve been talking for half an hour in that twittering bird language of yours and it’s making my head spin. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” Then she’d get a better look at us and spit on the ground. “What can you expect from these NERUS?” The existence within the IMPERIUM of millions of NERUS who spoke other languages was ignored or barely tolerated. With the years and the advent of The Fall of the House of [R]Usher, I was witness to a traumatic mental transformation, an inversion of the magnetic poles of the Rus, now avid for a full and Occidental life devoid of boiled potatoes or gherkins in brine.

  NIGHTS, WHITE (Белые ночи). I shall now reveal the secret, the stupefying rabbit pulled from the hat, of the WHITE NIGHTS. The dimmed brilliance of the moon and sun at their equinox. I had expressly chosen the date, awaited the favorable conjunction of the stars, and though I’ve taken care not to mention what month we met in, the reader who knows the work of F.M. must have intuited by now that I wouldn’t fail to take advantage of the phantasmagoric decor of the White Nights by describing a long walk through the insomniac city.

  LINDA and I left the Astoria arm in arm. In the scant light of that hour, the colors of her dress and the scarlet of her lips were muted. I set my feet down very slowly as we walked, fighting against something I felt was about to spill open inside me and wash through my cranial cavity. When we reached the Ekaterinsky Canal, LINDA leaned her elbows on the parapet and watched, absorbed in the water’s flow. After a while, she seemed to have come up with the words she’d been seeking for the previous half hour, even before the dispute with Maarif: “Znaesh ne nuzhen mne tvoi roman. Ja dolzhna otkazatsia; ja peredumala. Maarif konechno prav.”

  It was like a bolt of lightning. Such a tirade, and delivered in her very purest Russian: “Know what? I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going along with your plan. Maarif is right.” LINDA gave me no time to recover, to identify a tactic. She went on, “I can’t seem to find anything in your plan that actually deserves a movement of my soul, an effort of my spirit. I will never be someone who thinks that fashion and dressing well—everything you talked about this afternoon in the garden—are anything to lose sleep over, or that can change my life. God knows, I understand perfectly that you were counting on my youth!”

  “And on my money, LINDA!”

  “And on your money, IOSIF. But do you think that’s enough? You’d have to change me completely, make me into another girl. And I’m certain you wouldn’t be able to do that. For us Russians there’s no shame in being poor; on the contrary, the sin lies in riches. You can’t imagine how remote all the wealth and ostentation you talk about is from my Russian soul.”

  When I heard that I breathed easier. She’d made a mistake. I hurried to take advantage of this opening.

  “No, you Russians are essentially the same. It’s just that you’ve forgotten. In 1915, more posters of La Kholodnaya were sold than photos of the Imperial family—which in my view is perfectly understandable. I’m only trying to teach you to hate certain things such as those horrible paintings by Dalí you picked out today. And Maarif’s ridiculous Cossack overcoat, doesn’t it make you laugh? You think it’s a dumb joke, too, don’t you?”

  “But how can you pretend to know Russia? You, a foreigner? You’ll never be able to. We’re very different. You’ll think I’m exaggerating, but I feel that the OCCIDENT has lost all its . . . sanctity? Yes, sanctity is the right word. Look, I haven’t got a clear idea of where the failure lies, but I sense a certain false note in everything—a falsity that, in all sincerity, I don’t find in the life we have in Russia. Perhaps, some day, we will become OCCIDENTALIZED, but without transforming ourselves internally. Anyway, you told me that what interests you is the nontranscendent, the trivial—but don’t you want your novel to be transcendent? And what about the title? Not only
does it include the word “soul,” it’s in Latin.3 I perceive—and forgive me for telling you this—a profound contradiction between what you claim you want to do and your actual plan. Wouldn’t irresponsibility and carelessness suit your novel better? Why this mania to record every detail of this summer?”

  (This last argument struck a painful blow, I must acknowledge, and though I didn’t consider it sufficient to invalidate my experiment on the spot, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.)

  “The fact that I play the FLUTE, you know . . . And furthermore, there are personal reasons . . . There’s my hamster . . . I have a hamster in a cage in my room. I wouldn’t know who to ask to take care of him if I agreed to go on this trip with you.”

  “Maarif, maybe?” I hazarded in a whisper, dismayed by this unforeseen obstacle.

  “Maarif!”—she laughed. “He would never be able to take care of a hamster. The poor thing would starve to death. He’s not very practical. I must say that it was very intelligent of you to have chosen me, a woman, to consummate your plan. Maarif would never go along with such a project. And even I agreed to have dinner with you only out of curiosity. What harm could it do? Nothing could have been more innocent. But from there to accepting the whole story . . . N o thanks. But really, everything was wonderful and you were terrific. Maarif!”

  Which was to say: “Maarif, come on out of the shadows!” (I was perfectly well aware that he’d been following us.)

  I. I was also perfectly well aware that it was Maarif who’d been speaking through her mouth. Now, as it happens, I also knew who had been speaking through Maarif’s mouth. Her speech had contained an extremely important clue that cast her refusal in an entirely different light. She claimed to have no one to take care of her hamster, a dopey white-furred rodent, its cheeks perpetually stuffed with crackers. They sell hamsters in the zoomagazini along with Guinea pigs, little freshwater turtles, and goldfish. Another thing entirely is the entry that keeps company with “hamster” in the pages of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (Saint Petersburg, 1893). In Russian, hamster is хомяк (khomiak): dopey white-furred, et cetera. It’s the entry which follows that sounds the note of alarm: Khomiakov, Alexei Stepanovich, hard-core Slavophile and author of two important treatises, The Opinion of Foreigners about Russia and The Opinion of Russians about Foreigners, from which Maarif, and now LINDA, had extracted the majority of the theses she had just shared. Two phantoms, two shadows, following us along the bank of that canal.

  O

  OCCIDENT, THE. The mirror in which Russia gazes at itself each morning to touch up its own image. A mental construct, a grandiose civitas Dei built on a foundation of weighty volumes in folio, bad films, and high-gloss consumer goods of widespread appeal, such as my BOOGIE SHOES, to name but one example. Now, of course, seen from the IMPERIUM, the OCCIDENT presented a different aspect, as if it were a levogyrate or counterclockwise OCCIDENT. Viewed against a backdrop made not of steel but of polarizing glass. The inhabitants of the IMPERIUM could distinguish Paris with their naked eyes, and a Parisian bistro and, seated at one of its little tables, a very manly bourgeois, none other than the very leftist writer Louis Aragon dipping his croissant into his coffee. On the table, to his left, the page proofs of La Semaine Sainte. This gentleman would raise an accusatory index finger, wrinkle his brow, give voice to irate discourses: these images were perceived with dazzling clarity. Their background could only be guessed at: dim shapes, zones of complete darkness where the eye could discern nothing beneath ink blots and the hysterical crosshatch of deletions. Occasionally, on very sunny days, floating torsos could be made out, which moved past disembodied legs, orphaned arms, and talking heads: the mutilated fauna of the OCCIDENT. Many suspected that these beings may once have had a human appearance, an integral existence, and desperately sought a position from which to make a closer study of them. A maneuver that would, for a second, allow them to make out shadows slipping through the superfine sieve of glass, shadows that declaimed at the top of their lungs, wielded paintbrushes, spun with dazzling skill on the tips of their toes—only to disappear back into the recesses of that unknown world.

  I. Then, when at last one small volume of Borges—an Argentine writer and therefore suspect4—was published, a Russian friend of mine was assailed by the terrible suspicion that Borges was not Borges, but one of the anthology’s minor poets, a word in an index. Since I came from the OCCIDENT, he brought his question to me: Was Borges no more than one of those narrow light sources that thus emerge from the trap of polarization, a weak ray that shone only in the IMPERIUM without being reflected in the rest of the world?

  “A question that would have delighted Borges himself,” was my first thought, and I did not concede much importance to the incident. But the next day, I, too, fell prey to a terrible doubt and hurried to consult The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (БСЭ, 1970 edition). To my astonishment, I found two entries under Borges, with identical Christian and surnames, one—“Borges, Jorge Luis: obscure, right-wing Argentine writer, a rigid formalist whose works are of little interest”—after the other, “Borges, Jorge Luis: son of Borisov, Georgi, emigrant from Rovno, naturalized in Argentina in 1863. A deeply learned man, author of profound works of literature who, nevertheless, has found little acceptance in an OCCIDENT scourged by formalist experimentation and who had to wait for translation into Russian before gaining millions of readers and the reception that his genius merits. A progressive thinker, he participates in the struggle of the Argentine people for total independence from England,” et cetera.

  OPIUM. The immense Volga and its tributaries, the gritty sand of its beaches, the boardwalks with their flower beds where no flowers grew and their bandstands for Sunday concerts by municipal orchestras were to any European capital what the actual fragrances of springtime, the sooty smell of river vapors, and the natural odors of a healthy and clean but human body were to OPIUM, the perfume Yves Saint Laurent launched that year.

  The day had been warm and when night fell I strolled down to the city intending to take in some new release. I chose a seat on the last row of an almost empty cinema and spent an hour and a half on tenterhooks, ushered through the rings of cosmic dust that surrounded the inexplicable mystery of a crime, its spinning, floating mass suspended in space by forces we cannot comprehend, but there it is, we can touch it. And as I do so, I tremble from head to toe. Many summers have gone by since then and I think I may have lost this particular capacity. But that year I’d been reading tirelessly for months and was adjusted to react to the slightest stimuli: a very low threshold of response. It was easy for things to resonate deeply within me; I could be moved to tears by a story of loyalty, the hero who comes back years later and settles the score with a clean conscience. And I was much in need of pure essences, ideas uncontaminated by any hint of utilitarianism: abstract truths!

  Halfway through the film, someone began vibrating a few yards away. Was it the spring climate or perhaps an emotion similar to mine? I sensed the emanations of an excellent perfume, undoubtedly French. Either it had taken half an hour to reach my nostrils or the singular emotion evoked by the film’s mystery had opened new channels within me. I imagined her as a brunette; the scent was dark and rich. For a second, I weighed the possibility of attempting an approach on the way out of the cinema, but since we were in Muscovy I would risk encountering a sunny beauty with straight, blonde hair in a cloud of this perfume clearly intended for a dark-haired femme fatale—an apparently insignificant detail that might throw the entire experience off-kilter. I had learned to withdraw, had learned from Occam that essences must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary, and I went straight home.

  I. Many years later, LINDA, the story continues. I happened to be in G**, a small city in the south of France, and discovered a parfumerie, the Nuit Napolitaine. A striped awning protected the lone flask in its window from the sun’s rays and I leaned forward to get a closer look at the amber liquid within, the satin bow around the bottle’
s neck. A minute later, without having made any significant discovery, I adjusted my gaze to the mirrored surface of the glass and discovered my own eyes in the terrifying nearness of the reflection and, behind me, the specular image of this city where we are now, you and I—geraniums on the balconies, clean cobblestones, my bicycle leaning against a lamppost across the street. (I was in an excellent mood. Certain movies insist that we can achieve happiness by means of a twelve-speed bicycle and a baguette.)

  But there remained a matter that had always puzzled me: the relationship between what was suggested by the name on the flacon and the fragrance of the perfume itself. I asked for a sample of that fragrance in the window and tried without success to capture some special meaning as I inhaled. Only an image of a barefoot young man in a very expensive suit walking along a dilapidated dock at a beach somewhere in the south: the advertisement that had launched this perfume on the market. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine anything but that old jetty, the reverberating sea. I had traveled to this city in search of fragrances that would be devoid of all reference, for perfumes are innately free of such things; it is we who, by christening them, endow them with a story, though we violate their essential vagueness when we attach names to them. In fact, we have no particular names for smells. We say “it smells like” and name the smell by analogy. Scents thus introduce a terrifying glissando into our representation of the world: they are as invisible as sound, without limit of duration or spatial boundary. By giving names to perfumes, to fragrances, we seek to diminish this impression, to segment the continuum of smell into precise ideas that possess relevance and modernity. Now domesticated, these scents can establish a membrane between nature (this gray city, the dirty time of year) and ourselves: the cushion of air on which we glide, inaudible.