Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (10 page)

In the end, Azazello, emissary of Woland, the devil, gives M
ARGARITA
a magical unguent that will enable her to fly. T
HELONIOUS
, too, will one day fly, before L
INDA’S
astonished eyes.

M
EMORY
B
UFFER
.
It’s an instant of seeing yourself from the outside, holding your breath while it happens. It allows us to postpone, for a thousandth of a second, the experience of the smiling face, and receive it steadily, free of the trembling of our hands. It allows for a minimum interval of certainty between the eye and the real image, a lapse of time that is sufficient to work it through entirely and render it in improved form, ready to be digested. It is a gulf of temporary oblivion, a subtle snare, a pass of the prestidigitator’s hand. (L
INDA
would film our entire journey through Crimea. I showed her how to do this with my camcorder
,
the latest model, complete with
MEMORY BUFFER
.)

“I want to show you how the instant camera works, too.” (The machine whirring in my hands.) “Look at this,” I said, handing her the shot. “Those are your legs.” (L
INDA’S
agile legs encased in jeans, slender and rounded, much preferable to the sight of them unclad: ugly prolongations of the torso finished off with feet, her toes joined to each other by a membrane:
the mallard’s webbed feet.
)

“Don’t you think they’re easier to see there, in the photo?”

I.
“Stay, swift instant, you are so fair!” How difficult it is to put down on paper the deep sorrow, the sad evocation of unhappy love, that a song evokes when it moves us for a moment. It’s always while we’re living, never while we’re remembering the past, that we would like to be conceded the grace of an eternal moment. We can’t imagine that Goethe uttered this phrase as he read an obscure poet of the Ming dynasty in the solitude of his study. Only when we breathe happily beneath a blue sky do we want to halt time, to withstand every one of its tiniest recesses.

But time’s nature is inapprehensible; it remains deep in the background of our lives and, incapable of observing it objectively from the present moment, we know nothing, in the end, of its fierce transit. Only when we spend an idle moment leafing through old fashion magazines do we discover the degree to which that humanity, those others so different from ourselves, entered into contact with eternity. For the fashion that dictates a certain type of hairstyle—a feeling of well-being when attired in a made-to-measure suit, throatily
tra-la-la-
ing with all the exaltation of an opera singer, some tune from the last movie we saw—frees us from our fears about what was and what will be, to live in a perfect, orgiastic present.

a) In order to put past time—the old fashions—to the test, I have a scratched record with the songs I once enjoyed, a test-record. Each time I listen to it, there is, between today’s “I” and the song that only yesterday filled me to my brim, an immense space, difficult to conceive of. The bass is no longer today’s bass, so juicy, so pectoral; the highs are scandalously strident, the voices saccharine, the keyboards tinny. “What’s missing here?” I wonder, displeased by this pallid music and the answer is: life is missing. Life, seasoned with the salt of
frivolity,
which is like the water we add to these dry, dehydrated songs to make them appetizing.

The idea of the past, the history of the universe, would be incomplete without this slight adjustment. The sensation of well-being—between sheets whose colorful patterns are designed to accord with the feeling of a today that already, by tomorrow, will be an embarrassing yesterday when it sees itself reflected with appalling fidelity in the photos of yesteryear and the collections of “oldies but goodies” advertised on the
RADIO
—is the principal motor of existence. Trivial, yes: but then life is, too.

M
OON
W
ALK
.
One afternoon we stopped at a pension in Yevpatoriya, beside the sea. As night fell, we strolled down to the little square with its dance floor where older couples, clearly
VILLAGERS
, circled slowly, as if they were herding the foreign rhythms that poured forth inexorably from the loudspeaker. I wanted to teach L
INDA
to dance and thus enable her to divine the beat’s hidden accents without dispersing her energies in the cymbals’ reverberation to smooth out the angles and display her skill at sketching the broader cadences that enclose the rhythm’s less perceptible tremors.

In fact, for
P.O.A.,
it was enough that she could dance, whether or not she did it well. The important thing was to introduce a meaning into her moves, reproduce the process that had allowed me, during long dance sessions, to break down my
pas
into elemental gestures that might even be reduced to notations. One of these, in which I raised my arms to the height of my head and agitated them rhythmically as if saying good-bye, was indeed a good-bye to my former life full of worries, absurdly responsible, my sleepless nights. An innovative lighting technology of those years—a phantasmagorical strobe—immobilized the shuttlecock of my dancing into very crisp snapshots that emerged from the darkness one after another for as long as the blink of magnesium lasted. Beneath this light, interrogated by it, immobile in my own perception but actually in movement, I wondered one night: why do we dance? How to find a satisfactory explanation for this irrational fact? Was the world not full of inexplicable phenomena, then, if I couldn’t find an answer to the question of something as trivial and widespread as dance? Incapable of sidestepping these lacunae in my knowledge, I found myself thinking of prehistoric shadows, totems, roaring lions, ritual cavorting around the bonfires. We kept on moving there, on that same dance floor, essentially as we did five or ten thousand years earlier,
voguing freely across the savannah, a thing as elemental as the release of your breath. I was never again the same after that dance revelation.

Curiously, the only songs that aroused my enthusiasm were the
hits
of the moment. Very silly songs—Italian, mainly, in the mid-eighties—which, once the season was over, were cast off without an afterthought. The music didn’t suffice unto itself, it was we who had to infuse it with life, connect it to our
up-to-date
nervous centers, surround it with the truths of the present day, season it with our acute awareness of our own youth and strength. We would stamp our feet in rage if some
disc jockey,
well intentioned but stupid, tried to stir us with a potpourri of old favorites; the revolutions of the dark mass of dancers would slow, as if encumbered by an invisible weight, a generalized yawning would ensue, people stumbling into each other, hisses. When we’d gone very limp, almost to the point of death, the
DJ
would inject us with a strong dose of some group that was very bad but very new, and we would hurl ourselves to the center of the floor once again and spend hours in a zone of time that could only be accessed through music and dancing: when their effect wore off, the grayness of your gray life awaited you.

M
ORRIS
, W
ILLIAM.
When, after nightfall, I sat on the terrace of the
DACHA
we’d rented in Crimea and devoted several hours to making some notes for this work, I would generally visualize myself as a Benedictine monk stooped over the
Imago Mundi
of Honorius Inclusus: the smoothness of the skillfully honed parchment, his miniaturized initials in blue and azure, the fine glints of gold leaf that he would study before printing this
ENCYCLOPEDIA
.

I.
I would like to heighten the story of P.O.A. in some way, confer upon my book the status of those incunabula
in folio,
prized not for the apocryphal text they contain but for their beautiful illuminations depicting the garden of delights. I’ll have to resort to the splendor of
coated stock, perfect for photos in every color, like those magnificent ones of the Venice carnival I showed you; images that suggested to us the
essentially
different and more profound life led by Pierrots and Columbines. In the same way, this
Lexicon Universalis,
for which I’ve designed a cover with silver Cyrillic letters scattered chaotically across a field of blue—a composition that prefigures the eccentric character of the text, from which the reader can extract the title as from an
alphabet soup
—must be printed in accordance with the canons of an expensive fashion magazine. An entire fascicle with views of Saint Petersburg, pictures of you on every page, the multicolored Montgolfier that repeats the motif of those Russian cupolas in red, green, and blue; your delicate satin shoes in the foreground of the luxurious restaurant at the Astoria where we dined that night, and the P
ACKARD’S
chrome-plated grille, with its little stag, rampant . . . And since this, too, is now possible, I would insert perfumed strips impregnated with
OPIUM
, with Anaïs Anaïs, with the perfume in the multifaceted bottle I gave you that night in Fedosia, on the mountain.

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

N
ERUS
(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 I
MPERIUM’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 I
MPERIUM
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.

N
IGHTS
, W
HITE
(Белые ночи). I shall now reveal the secret, the stupefying rabbit pulled from the hat, of the W
HITE
N
IGHTS
. 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.

L
INDA
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, L
INDA
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.” L
INDA
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, L
INDA
!”

“And on your money, I
OSIF
. 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 O
CCIDENT
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 O
CCIDENTALIZED
, 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 L
INDA
, had extracted the majority of the theses she had just shared. Two phantoms, two shadows, following us along the bank of that canal.