This understanding, and not the facts of the actual incident, became the stronger part of Jude's recollection, although over time he thought of it less often.
In the last few years he hadn't recalled it at all, unless he'd touched the scar behind his ear, and then it was only a distant whisper of brilliant cold, a fragment of a broken and buried thing.
In a mind the past and the future, dreams and imagination, are seldom well regulated.
Mikhail Guskov, as he is now, was born fifty-five years ago, in November, in a small town outside Sarajevo. His mother was a Turkish Muslim and his father was a Christian Serb who returned from a holiday to Turkey with a wife whom nobody could understand and whom everyone suspected of being payment for some dark deed Mikhail's father had done for her family.
The wife, Ain, spoke none of their languages, although she soon learned, and along with the words came the nonverbal realization that her husband was a violent alcoholic, given to depression, insomnia, and bouts of deep self-pity rooted in a fierce patriotism for the old country, in which he still lived physically but was forever emotionally exiled from by its redefinition as communist Yugoslavia.
Ain's anxieties were complicated for her by her own devout religion, filial piety, and keen sense of personal preservation, which she extended to her baby son when he arrived nine months to the day after her wedding. She could see that she wouldn't be alive too much longer if she stayed and so she packed up Hilel, prising up a floorboard to take the secret stash of drinking money from its biscuit tin. On foot and by train she fled across Bulgaria to settle at Igneada, on the Black Sea, a place she had been to as a girl and where she'd eaten the sweetest candy she'd ever tasted.
Hilel doesn't remember the story of how his mother and father met and married, so that section of history does not exist. There was something about a business deal, he thinks, some kind of bride-for-favours arrangement (the local beauty the only wealth the poverty-stricken grateful parents could bestow) and perhaps his father had killed a bad man. In his mind he imagines the little family of two leaving Sarajevo on a stony road, the city shot-blasted with despair, as it will be again in the 1990s thanks to the shells of the warring factions. Behind him his father, a colossus seated on top of their small white-painted house, polishes a gun, his movements betraying the covetous evil of a monster. His mother drags the little boy (him) along by his hand and he can't keep up with her and his arm is nearly pulled out of its socket. But that's not a real memory, that's only a dream.
Something he does recall is that his father had big red hands, and his mother bore their marks on her arms and shoulders and back. He did actually see that.
In later years he remembers Ain as a stern voice that is always angry, because she never manages to be angry at the right time with the right person. The only person she is not angry at is Allah, but this is the person whom Hilel comes to be angry with the most, because he is always on the receiving end of her rage, when really he thinks it should be Allah under that hand—who else has given her this unsatisfactory life? Her hands aren't red, though. They're tough with work, but they're kind in his memory. Even though they hit him many times. He was a naughty child.
Ain's family are reasonably well off, as it turns out. They send her enough money to start a modest business in carpets. For ten years nothing much happens, or, if it does, he doesn't recall it.
But then Ain leaves Igneada and returns to her family home in Istanbul, to begin a new marriage with an older man who owns a fleet of lorries. There's a lot of conflict there. Hilel's aunts have many older children who aren't pleased to see him and he's expected to pray and go to the mosque which, given his antipathy to Allah, is the proverbial last straw on the camel's back. Hilel runs away from home two years later. He was the top of his class at school, so it's a disgrace as well as a mystery. Ain never sees or hears from him again. When he looks back on this decision it's in the light of the knowledge that his act would lead directly to her death in the cab of a dark green delivery truck loaded with red capsicums. Poisoned by diesel fumes and carbon monoxide, Ain has at last agreed with him and discarded her faith, but at the time all he could think of was escape from the prison that is the world as it's created by the minds of her family.
He moves across the city and deals hash, heroin, and other types of opiates. He's a delivery boy at first, but quickly he learns to skim money—ignorant of his heritage he's nonetheless a born scammer, like his father. It's dangerous, but he's much smarter than his masters, which isn't saying an awful lot, so the gap between them is even wider than they grudgingly suspected. They would soon learn its real extent—to their cost.
By the time he's seventeen Hilel is called Mahmood. He owns the house and the street and the old man who gave him his first parcel to carry across town. Although he doesn't know it he also owns the truck in which his mother killed herself, and the delivery business as well. By now, though, he has more pressing matters. His life is in danger. Rival associations are closing in on him, and they have many more men and guns than he has, so again he takes all he can carry and leaves. He follows the Black Sea coast, heading into the Ukraine on a false passport.
This crossing entails the first of his true transformations in which he alters his appearance via the scalpel of cosmetic surgery and his ways by a lot of book-learning to become Pavlo Mykytiuk. It's his first moment of genius. He understands that he can lose more than his appearance. He can lose his entire history.
Pavlo is a hopeful young Communist. Mahmood had leanings that way, but he was never able to really break with his old Islamic background. Pavlo has no background, except in his own imagination, hence he's free to be an idealist. He joins a young people's commune in Volgograd and learns to speak Russian.
Of course, nobody there believes he's Ukrainian, but they don't care because they are young and all are glad that someone has come so far to join them for their beliefs. In this respect they're as blinded by fervour as the drug dealers of Istanbul. Also, although Pavlo has taken a lot of trouble with himself, old habits die harder than mere identities and before too long he has to leave again, a wake of accusations and bad blood behind him. He takes most of their money and feeble possessions with him. What was his was theirs, and what was theirs was certainly his.
When he remembers it in the far future this part of his journey is like a dark forest of festering emotions, mostly fear and loathing. He walks a gritty track. On all sides large houses shut him out. People won't speak to him. His lip-service communism only gets him so far, because already new values and different kinds of systems are sweeping through the country. He tries his luck closer to the centre, in Tula, but the times are so hard he falls foul of both the reigning criminals and the police and finds himself sent to jail pending trial, where the investigation into his alleged crimes uncovers his third false set of identity papers.
Finally he is entered into the Kodeks—the database of Soviet criminal records—as Alexei Kurchatov (naming himself after one of their most notable physicists from an article he's read in an old magazine) and is incarcerated for theft, drug dealing, running a prostitution racket, and a variety of other trumped-up charges that the KGB select from the approved list. The KGB have got in on the act because false ID constitutes an internal “crime against the state.” He's lucky he isn't sent to a Gulag, but instead he's transported to Moscow for further investigation at the request of a judicious immigration officer. In Moscow his papers are lost and he's left on the remand wing of some pit of a prison, trying not to catch TB as around him men drown in their own arterial blood.
Ironically, it's inside that Alexei meets the people who will succeed the Party to rule Russia in the 1990s—the Mafiocracy. As for the KGB, they soon lose interest because in October 1991 their organization is dissolved and they've got their own futures to worry about.
The key figure Alexei meets in prison is Jurgenev—a man with all the physical presence of a rat's shadow, who is both intelligent and corrupt to the marrow of hi
s bones. Now Alexei, unlike Pavlo, is an old hand who has been down the route of youthful idealism and wisely spurned it in the name of self-interest and survival. By conceding to the only two moral imperatives of the Russia of that moment he has finally become the genuine article.
Alexei immediately understands that Jurgenev is a powerful player in the prison community—most of whom are seething with righteous anger at their scapegoatings: these are servants of the state who have been sacrificed to the public anxiety mill by their fellows. Some of them, including Jurgenev, used to hold key positions in the government and they are all determined to escape jail and exact some vengeance of their own. Alexei is lucky to share a cell with Jurgenev, because this association prevents him from becoming one of the slaves who provide sexual satisfactions, scrub toilets, slop out, and do all the other filthy and degrading jobs.
For his part Jurgenev can see that Alexei is a born criminal, with an unusually sharp mind. Perhaps with dreams of family and empire he organizes private tutors for Alexei from other areas of the prison. Then, as Jurgenev's personal assistant, Alexei is taught science, languages, mathematics, and how to rule from beneath the foot of the oppressor; what Jurgenev slyly names, in a voice that is proud and contemptuous in its clever understanding of the world, “the woman's gambit.”
So, it's inside jail that Alexei ascends almost directly to the right hand of a small and ugly god, and for three years they organize and plot and bribe and threaten until at last they are freed and strut into Moscow at the head of a little army of ruthless men, as savage as street dogs, who begin to cut, shoot, and stab a path to wealth and power.
Jurgenev has an eye only for the cash: he's no philosopher. He's using Alexei's superior understanding of politics and humanity as his own, and will continue to do so as long as it suits him, or until he has no further use for it. Alexei sees that Jurgenev's power is growing so this day, in which the munificent father rat will turn on and cannibalize his son, looks likely to arrive. Alexei could dispatch the old bastard himself, but he's got no interest in being another Muscovite scum-sucker in Ferragamos and Dior. Kurchatov has served his purpose and may as well kill himself as try to escape Jurgenev's claw.
Alexei Kurchatov's body, face blown off, is discovered afloat in a Chechen ghetto storm drain after a gun deal goes awry. That very night, in another Moscow precinct, a new student applies to study at the University, his application and genuine examination certificates gratefully received along with a fistful of US dollars and a heavy crate of Russian cash in notes so used that the grease of many fingerprints has turned them almost completely grey.
So begins the career of Yuri Ivanov, well-heeled Muscovite scholar, with plenty of surprisingly helpful mafia connections and friends in positions that count. His only danger remains discovery—but Jurgenev, once his protector, has enough to occupy his mind with a sudden and depressing fresh interest in his activities due to the police's new crackdown measures on organized crime, so that's taken care of for the time being. Alexei has gone forever—his corruption and his despair with him, drowned in the filth of the sewers.
Yuri, on the other hand, is a sophisticate. He understands the mafia and deals with its business cordially, distantly, a good servant and a polite master. He would never soil his own hands with violence directly, not like Alexei, who has shot more men than he could name. His interest is science and the mind and he sets to studying it with the zeal of a true convert. The guns of ex-brothers hold no fear for him. Some of them even admire him from afar.
Yuri moves into psychology just as the boom begins and grants, prizes, and awards come his way from several areas, including the FSB itself, successor to the KGB, that is beginning to see a use for someone capable of great deceptions. They ask him to travel and study in Germany, to spy on the West and to continue his work.
It's in Germany that Ivanov meets the first of the people who will change his mind, instead of his changing it for himself. This person is a professor and future Nobel winner, Nikolai Kropotkin. It was the millennium year, and everything had a feeling of starting afresh. When they put their heads together they realized the direction that this newness was taking.
Ivanov understands that it's not, as he thought once, that God is the master; nor, as he thought once, that he will be master; nor, as he thought once, that ideology is the master; nor, as he thought once, that money is the master; nor guns nor knowledge nor power nor democracy nor any state. The master of mankind is so much larger than all of these very small, very ancient, very wrong-focused ideas.
All these ideas are what you get when you stare the wrong way down the telescope. The right ideas are the ones you get by seeing yourself not as a player in a game or a mote in the eye of god but as a world, an entire universe, within which all things are possible and all sources found.
Kropotkin and Ivanov altered the map of everything with their view. They posited that the driving forces that dominate individual lives originate deep in the structures of the brain and its layout, in our ancient heritage, whose shadows stream backwards from man to ape to older ages when we were as blunt and formless as jellyfish and aware of nothing more than the rhythmic swing of the tides.
But neither of them would have seen this if Ivanov had not once been Hilel and all those men after. Because that was the story that gave him his clue and conviction.
Kropotkin and Ivanov put together the physiology and the psychology and assembled them with memetic theory and they realized—although, like all revelations, it was only a hypothesis and not the whole truth—that the master of man is the idea of progress and improvement and betterment and ease, and that this whole memeplex, which is the fancy articulation of survival itself, has us all enslaved. To put it another way, the development of Mappa Mundi, as all such developments, was a necessary result of our own nature, as irresistible as evolution itself. What we can change, we shall change. What comes to hand, we shall use. What we see, we presume to understand. When the basic needs are satisfied, the restless mind turns itself towards improvements.
Yuri Ivanov saw the whole cultural flow of those days—the self-absorption, the self-examination, and the constant self-flagellation towards the perfection of our physical bodies and our “holistic” persons—as exactly the same impulse as the drive to religious exactitude and national fervour that had made Ain and his unremembered father so damned irritable and so impossible to reason with or placate.
If we are right, we shall be saved. If we are good, we shall be saved. If this, that, and the other, then we shall be saved. Perfection and purity, fame and the life everlasting. What was the difference?
And, as Ivanov only suspected then, there was nothing you could do that would save you. Death, like taxes, was certain. Nothing survived. It was the final, unbelievable insult.
Ivanov and Kropotkin knew there'd be no solving death in their lifetimes. So, they reckoned, they might as well forget about it. Meanwhile there might be something in trying to free human life from the slavery of survival.
Their work was not received gladly. Soon Kropotkin moved to richer projects back in the motherland and the CIA approached Ivanov and suggested that a new country with greater wealth might suit him, if he would only assist them in a few military projects. But although he did go and became a US citizen, he maintained all his old contacts and told them it was merely a front, a double act, another face to add to his collection.
Because they knew some of his story, they believed him.
Mary was thirteen when she visited what had once been the old family home in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Her sister, Shelagh, was with her. They hadn't wanted to come, but the funeral arrangements for Gerry Delaney had specified a ceremony to take place on the old site of St. Ignatius's, beside the cemetery where his parents had been laid to rest.
The Trailways bus moved slowly, in an endless grumble, through places of passing familiarity to both girls—Washington, DC, Philadelphia—and then, much later, through towns Mary had never heard of, with
names like Frackville and Shenandoah.
In between the towns, each smaller and more grindingly stricken by economic failure than the last, the road meandered along hills lined with the soft grey-brown of winter trees stitching a white sky to the ground. Mary tried to see through the masses of narrow trunks, but at that time of year the light was poor even under their leafless branches and within a few yards a greyness became blackness, became nothing at all, until the bus seemed to move on a narrow belt of solid ground between two gulfs of unknown space.
Gerry had been their uncle. He had died in Allentown, another name on a map that Mary had to fill in for herself, like a blank outline in a colouring book. She imagined small houses of gray clapboard outers and white window frames, streets traced with the black nets of electric lines and punctuated with tough, upright telegraph poles, occasional garish notices for McDonald's and the laundromat, but it was vague and flat in her head like a packed-up film set. The only 3-D image she had was that of Gerry himself, a heavyweight man who might have been a boxer in other lives, dying at the gas station where he worked, lying in a pool of unleaded as the tanker hose he'd failed to lock down bled copiously over him until the vapour-autoback system shut off the flow. The coronary had started as he'd bent to fix it in place.
“They were lucky there wasn't a spark,” Mary's mother had said, her first words after some moments of reflection on the news. Mary'd looked at her in appalled silence. So they were, but was that the only thing to say?
Gerry was the hallmark of the Delaney clan. He'd served in the army, then got the GI Bill and studied to be a realtor, making the mistake of remaining in the old mining towns of his youth, where property and goodwill both came cheaper than usual. The business had fallen through because Gerry didn't have any skill as a negotiator. He was a nice guy. He'd then moved into insurance, but hadn't the heart to press his policies on people already stranded by life's high tide up in the hills. He ran a bar and diner for a while in Jim Thorpe, the Switzerland of America, but had to leave after a New York ski instructress accused him of sexual harassment. He ended up in Allentown, dispensing gas, working late nights, building up the gutful of fat and disappointments that had smothered him.
Mappa Mundi Page 3
