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"Really?"
asked Ansky.

"Don't play the fool," said Afanasievna's hoarse voice.
"I understand you. From the start, I've known who you are."

"And who am
I?" asked Ansky.

"A
Jewish brat who confuses his desires with reality."

"Reality,"
murmured Ansky, "can be pure desire."

Afanasievna
laughed.

"What
should I make of that?" she asked.

"Whatever you like, but take care, comrade," said Ansky.
"Consider certain kinds of people, for example."

"Who?"
asked Afanasievna.

"The ill," said Ansky. "Tuberculosis patients, say.
According to their doctors, they're dying, and there's no arguing with that.
But for the patients, especially on some nights, some particularly long
evenings, desire is reality and vice versa. Or take people suffering from
impotence."

"What kind of impotence?" asked Afanasievna without
letting go of Ansky's genitals.

"Sexual impotence," said Ansky. "The impotent are
more or less like tuberculosis patients, and they feel desire. A desire that in
time not only supplants reality but is imposed on it."

"Do you
think," asked Afanasievna, "that the dead feel sexual desire?"

"Not
the dead," said Ansky, "but the living dead do. When I was in
Siberia
I met a hunter whose sexual organs had been torn
off."

"Sexual
organs!" said Afanasievna mockingly.

"His
penis and testicles," said Ansky. "He peed through a little straw,
sitting or on his knees, crouching."

"You've made
yourself clear," said Afanasievna.

"Well, anyway, once a
week, no matter the weather, this man (who wasn't young, either) went into the
forest to look for his penis and testicles. Everyone thought he would die
someday, caught in the snow, but the man always came back to the village,
sometimes after an absence of months, and always with the same news: he hadn't
found them. One day he decided to stop looking. Suddenly, he seemed to age: one
night he looked fifty and the next morning he looked eighty. My detachment left
the village. Four months later we passed through again and asked what had
happened to the man without attributes. They told us he had married and was
leading a happy life. One of my comrades and I wanted to see him: we found him
preparing his gear for another long stay in the forest. He looked fifty again,
instead of eighty. Or perhaps even forty in certain parts of his face: around
the eyes, the lips, the jaw. Two days later, when we left, I believed the
hunter had managed to impose his desires on reality, which, in their fashion,
had transformed his surroundings, the village, the villagers, the forest, the
snow, his lost penis and testicles. I imagined him on his knees, pissing, his
legs well apart, in the middle of the frozen steppe, northward bound, striding
toward the white deserts and blizzards with his knapsack full of traps, utterly
oblivious of what we call fate."

"That's a pretty story," said Afanasievna as she let go
of Ansky's genitals. "A pity I'm too old and have seen too much to believe
it."

"It has nothing to do with belief," said Ansky, "it
has to do with understanding, and then changing."

After
this, at least in appearance, Ansky's and Ivanov's lives took different
courses.

The young Jew was
plunged into frenetic activity. In 1929, for example, at the age of twenty, he
participated in the creation of magazines (in which none of his writing ever
appeared) in
Moscow
,
Leningrad
,
Smolensk
,
Kiev
,
Rostov
. He was a founding
member of the Theater of Imaginary Voices. He tried to find a publisher for
some of Khlebnikov's posthumous writings. As a reporter for a paper that never
saw the light of day, he interviewed General Tukhachevsky and General Blücher.
He took a lover, Marya Zamyatina, a doctor ten years older than himself and
married to a party boss. He embarked on a friendship with Grigory Yakovin, a
great expert in contemporary German history, with whom he went on long walks
and carried on conversations about the German language and Yiddish. He met
Zinoviev. He wrote a strange poem in German on Trotsky's exile. He also wrote a
series of aphorisms in German titled
Reflections on the Death of Evgenia
Bosch,
pseudonym of the Bolshevik leader Evgenia Gotlibovna (1879-1924),
about whom Pierre Broue says: "Party member 1900, Bolshevik 1903. Arrested
1913, deported, escaped 1915, took refuge in the
United States
, pursued
revolutionary activities with Pyatakov and Bukharin and opposed Lenin with
regard to the national question. Returned after the February Revolution and
took a leading role in the
Kiev
uprising and the civil war. Signatory of the Declaration of 46. Committed
suicide in 1924 as a gesture of protest." And he wrote a poem in Yiddish,
laudatory, vulgar, full of barbarisms, on Ivan Rajia (1887-1920), one of the
founders of the Communist Party of Finland, probably assassinated by his own
comrades in a leadership struggle. He read the futurists, the members of the
Centrifuge group, the imagists. He read Platonov's first stories and
Babel
, as well as Boris Pilnyak (whom he didn't like at
all) and Andrey Bely, whose novel
Petersburg
kept him up for four days. He wrote an essay on the future of literature,
which began and ended with the word
nothing.
Meanwhile, there was
trouble in his relationship with Marya Zamyatina, who had another lover besides
him, a doctor specializing in lung disease, a man who cured tuberculosis
patients! And who lived most of the time in the Crimea and whom Marya Zamyatina
described as if he were Jesus Christ reincarnated, minus the beard and plus a
white coat, a white coat that cropped up in Ansky's dreams in 1929. And he kept
working hard at the Moscow Library. And sometimes, when he remembered, he wrote
letters to his parents, to which they responded with love and nostalgia and
courage, never mentioning the hunger or scarcity that were rampant in the
formerly fertile lands of the
Dnieper
. And he
also had time to write a strange humor piece titled
Landauer,
based on
the last days of the German writer Gustav Landauer, who in 1918 wrote his
Address
to Writers
and in 1919 was executed for his participation in the
Munich
Soviet
Republic
. And in 1929,
too, he read a recently published novel, Alfred Doblin's
Berlin
Alexanderplatz,
which struck him as notable and memorable and distinguished
and drove him to seek out more books by Doblin, finding in the Moscow Library
The
Three Leaps of Wang-lun
(1915),
  
Wadzek's
 
Battle with
 
the
 
Steam Engine
 
(1918),
 
Wallenstein
(1920), and
Mountains, Seas, and Giants
(1924).

And while Ansky read Doblin or
interviewed Tukhachevsky or made love with Marya Zamyatina in his room on
Petrov of Moscow Street, Efraim Ivanov published his first great novel, the one
that would open the gates of heaven to him, recovering on the one hand the
devotion of his readers and on the other winning for the first time the respect
of those he considered his equals, those writers, talented writers, who tended
the flame of Tolstoy and Chekhov, who tended the flame of Pushkin, of Gogol,
who suddenly noticed him, who saw him for the first time, in fact, and accepted
him.

Gorky, who at the time had yet to definitively resettle in
Moscow
, wrote him a letter
with an Italian postmark in which one could discern the admonishing finger of
the founding father, but in which one could also perceive a wealth of kindness
and readerly gratitude.

Your
novel, he said, has afforded me some . . . very amusing moments. One detects in
it ... a faith, a hope. Your imagination cannot be called . . . stifled. No, in
no way whatsoever . . . can that be said. There are those who speak of ... the
Soviet Jules Verne. After long reflection, however, I think you are . . .
better than Jules Verne. A more . . . mature writer. A writer guided by ...
revolutionary instincts. A ... great writer. As one could only expect of a ...
Communist. But let's speak frankly . . . as Soviets. The literature of the
proletariat speaks to ... today's man. It sets out problems that perhaps will
only be solved . . . tomorrow. But it is addressed ... to today's worker, not
the worker ... of the future. In your next books you must . . . bear that in
mind.

If Stendhal, as it is said, danced when he read Balzac's critique
of
The Charterhouse of Parma,
Ivanov spilled countless tears of joy upon
receiving
Gorky
's
letter.

The
novel, so unanimously acclaimed, was called
Twilight
and its plot was
very simple: a boy of fourteen abandons his family to join the ranks of the
revolution. Soon he's engaged in combat against Wrangel's troops. In the midst
of battle he's injured and his comrades leave him for dead. But before the
vultures come to feed on the bodies, a spaceship drops onto the battlefield and
takes him away, along with some of the other mortally wounded soldiers. Then
the spaceship enters the stratosphere and goes into orbit around Earth. All of
the men's wounds are rapidly healed. Then a very thin, very tall creature, more
like a strand of seaweed than a human being, asks them a series of questions
like: how were the stars created? where does the universe end? where does it
begin? Of course, no one knows the answers. One man says God created the stars
and the universe begins and ends wherever God wants. He's tossed out into
space. The others sleep. When the boy awakes he finds himself in a shabby room,
with a shabby bed and a shabby wardrobe where his shabby clothes hang. When he
goes to the window he gazes out in awe at the urban landscape of
New York
. But the boy
finds only misfortune in the great city. He meets a jazz musician who tells him
about chickens that talk and probably think.

"The
worst of it," the musician says to him, "is that the governments of
the planet know it and that's why so many people raise chickens."

The
boy objects that the chickens are raised to be eaten. The musician says that's
what the chickens want. And he finishes by saying:

"Fucking
masochistic chickens, they have our leaders by the balls."

He
also meets a girl who works as a hypnotist at a burlesque club, and he falls in
love. The girl is ten years older than the boy, or in other words twenty-four,
and although she has a number of lovers, including the boy, she doesn't want to
fall in love with anyone because she believes that love will use up her powers
as a hypnotist. One day the girl disappears and the boy, after searching for
her in vain, decides to hire a Mexican detective who was a soldier under Pancho
Villa. The detective has a strange theory: he believes in the existence of
numerous Earths in parallel universes. Earths that can be reached through
hypnosis. The boy thinks the detective is swindling him and decides to
accompany him in his investigations. One night they come upon a Russian beggar
shouting in an alley. The beggar shouts in Russian and only the boy can
understand him. The beggar says: I fought with Wrangel, show some respect,
please, I fought in Crimea and I was evacuated from
Sevastopol
in an English ship. Then the boy
asks whether the beggar was at the battle where he fell badly wounded. The
beggar looks at him and says yes. I was too, says the boy. Impossible, replies
the beggar, that was twenty years ago and you weren't even born yet.

Then
the boy and the Mexican detective set off west in search of the hypnotist. They
find her in
Kansas City
.
The boy asks her to hypnotize him and send him back to the battlefield where he
should have died, or accept his love and stop fleeing. The hypnotist answers
that neither is possible. The Mexican detective shows an interest in the art of
hypnosis. As the detective begins to tell the hypnotist a story, the boy leaves
the roadside bar and goes walking under the night sky. After a while he stops
crying.

He walks for hours. When he's
in the middle of nowhere he sees a figure by the side of the road. It's the
seaweedlike extraterrestrial. They
greet each other. They talk. Often, their
conversation is unintelligible. The subjects they address are varied: foreign
languages, national monuments, the last days of Karl Marx, worker solidarity,
the time of the change measured in Earth years and stellar years, the discovery
of America as a stage setting, an unfathomable void—as painted by Dore—of
masks. Then the boy follows the extraterrestrial away from the road and they
walk through a wheat field, cross a stream, climb a hill, cross another field,
until they reach a smoldering pasture.

In the next chapter, the boy is no longer a boy but a young man of
twenty-five working at a
Moscow
newspaper where he has become the star reporter. The young man receives the
assignment to interview a Communist leader somewhere in
China
. The trip, he is warned, is
extremely difficult, and once he reaches
Peking
,
the situation may be dangerous, since there are lots of people who don't want
any statement by the Chinese leader to get out. Despite these warnings, the
young man accepts the job. When, after much hardship, he finally gains access
to the cellar where the Chinese leader is hidden, the young man decides that
not only will he interview him, he'll also help him escape the country. The
Chinese leader's face, in the light of a candle, bears a notable resemblance to
that of the Mexican detective and former soldier under Pancho Villa. The
Chinese leader and the young Russian, meanwhile, come down with the same
illness, brought on by the pestilence of the cellar. They shake with fever,
they sweat, they talk, they rave, the Chinese leader says he sees dragons
flying low over the streets of
Peking
, the
young man says he sees a battle, perhaps just a skirmish, and he shouts hurrah
and urges his comrades onward. Then both lie motionless as the dead for a long
time, and suffer in silence until the day set for their flight.