Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (12 page)

P

P
ACKARD
.
I suspect that we are, to our Creator, as complex and mysteriously distant as machines, and that he swells with pride when he observes our perfection. In much the same way, we are unaware of the laws that govern the aesthetic evolution of the automobile; how it ceased to be the imperfect replica of a horse-drawn carriage and instead blossomed into the dazzling curves of the postwar P
ACKARD
. Neither do we understand the first thing about the incurable malaise that has attacked the motor vehicles of today, the causes of the regression that makes them more alien and horrible to look upon each year. It is torture to watch how designers—perhaps perturbed by the idea of the archetypal auto, the
mobilis
—have gradually stripped them of mudguards, running boards, chrome diadems, nickel-plated hubcaps; how, trapped in a vortex of perpetual transformation, they’ve veered in the wrong direction toward functionalism, aerodynamics, an absurd notion of comfort. It requires a great effort to understand this, for we never imagine that a hundred years of evolution could be enough to exhaust a set of forms; we continue to believe that thousands of different models, with new protuberances, await us—but that is not the case. The thesis of lineal progress ad infinitum denies what we know about the spiral of development with its declines and recoveries. And it’s clear that we now find ourselves at the end of a phase, L
INDA
, very far from the decade of true splendor to which this P
ACKARD
belongs. You can’t imagine how much work it was to find it. You Russians have nothing from this period; the entire stratum is empty, nary a
molar nor an occipital bone pitted with holes: nothing. This model is from ’49 (the straight-eight engine, three speeds, maximum velocity ninety-five miles per hour) and I’ll have you know that according to the crook at the rental agency this car once belonged to Beria, the fearsome Minister of the Interior. Ah, yes, the inevitable mythic provenance that adds 15 percent to the price. I didn’t hesitate to pay, the very latest fashion in cars is to prefer these beautiful models from the forties, built for an efficient drive, conscientiously prepared for the road like those elderly couples, tourist fossils from the B
ADEN
-B
ADEN
era, who buy pith helmets, binoculars inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a rattan basket for provisions, a cashmere throw against the evening chill, sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames. A lost precision: the visible evidence of expenditure. When I was a boy I’d help my grandfather wax his Oldsmobile and shine its nickel-plated grille. Then we’d go for a ride, simply to enjoy the pleasure of speed: the tufted leather upholstery, the steering wheel’s imitation-bone Bakelite. I would sit very close to him, not wanting to miss any part of the way he yanked the stick shift and slammed on the clutch. Alongside us were Pontiacs and the omnipresent Chevrolets, the couples within them embracing as if they were relaxing on an enormous sofa, Paul Anka blasting from the
RADIO
. . . How to explain this to you?

I know you would have preferred one of those modern cars from Japan. I’ve learned to hate them. Japan is nothing but a parvenu in the O
CCIDENTAL
work of machinery, a clever imitator, incapable of capturing the profound logic that underlies the four speeds of the internal combustion engine. Have you ever seen a Japanese oil painting? It’s the same thing. The coloring is sickly, the composition chaotic, the touch of the brush uncertain. Where automobiles are concerned, they haven’t been able to come up with an equivalent to the fine technique of an Utamaro, a Suzuki Harunobu, those exquisite woodblock prints
on rice paper. Only the Chinese, far wiser, have discovered the crowd of cyclists, the hybrid rickshaw. Isn’t the apparent ease with which a cyclist pedals, though all his muscles are straining, more Oriental? As is the modest size of the sedan chair. But this tendency toward lightness, when translated into automobile design, brought on the disaster of the horrible Nissan, the irresponsible airiness of the Mazda. The Japanese invasion has been successful because it found an important chink in the O
CCIDENTAL
bloc: the aerodynamic tendency. Evidence of which can be found in the showy “ducktail”—you see? Flight!—at the beginning of the sixties. Then in the seventies the Arabs had us worrying about not using so much oil, which meant we were ready when Ford, in despair, launched its execrable Torino, an entirely plain vehicle, nothing at all for the imagination to cling to, antiseptic.

I’m comforted only by the knowledge that vehicles propelled by solar batteries are on their way, and these new ecological cars, these
zen
cars—their retractable headlights making them look like insects—may give rise to automobiles that are fundamentally new, perhaps in no way different from arachnids, a complete fusion with nature: an emergence from the kingdom of the machine into something else. Can’t we view the horse as the final phase of the prehistoric automobile that belonged to the civilization prior to ours? Isn’t it true that the Japanese—them again!—have invented a many-limbed robot, the prototype of some future means of transport?

(We drove toward the sea together across the coastal hills, our P
ACKARD
swift and ultrapowerful; L
INDA
eating her fill of grapes for the first time in years. The vineyards of Crimea.)

P
ALACE
(C
HINESE
).
I got off the train at O**, near Petersburg, at the beginning of June. The station virtually a ruin. Birdcalls in the silence, a warm breeze. To judge by the scant number of passengers continuing
on, there must have been only two or three more stops on the line. At the edge of a shady grove of oak trees I came to a fence that bore the map of the park. I studied it as if it were an animated tableau and I a medieval knight confronting the thousand possible paths across a game board that chance might dictate. My finger inexorably traced the route to the C
HINESE
P
ALACE
. I was thirsty. Birdcalls in the silence, a warm breeze.

How could I have imagined that what awaited me around a bend in that hedge maze would turn out to be an unexpected augury of the sort provided by the
I Ching
? The C
HINESE
P
ALACE
was not the Ming pagoda, the gilded pavilion I had imagined. For a moment I thought I’d lost my way and had reached some imperial
DACHA
of Peter II heretofore unsuspected by historians. A pond—a small artificial lake with ducks—reflected the Italianate volutes of a
PALACE
entirely devoid of Asiatic complexities. I consulted the sign to be certain I hadn’t made a mistake. The caption, as revealing as a conceptualist label, read: C
HINESE
P
ALACE
. And since, effectively, this Russian P
ALACE
was thus transformed into the C
HINESE
P
ALACE
I was seeking, I thought of two more plaques. One in front of the lake that read
Sea,
and the other over the little house for the ducks, stating
Gryphons
.

I found the basket of slippers for visitors entirely at my disposal; the season had only just begun. I chose a shapeless green pair with elastic bands at the heels then stood up and walked forward uncertainly, a centimeter of felt between the soles of my feet and the floor. As I waited for the guide, it began to rain. There would be no other visitors today. I crossed the threshold and shuffled along with difficulty, giving the parquet floor a nice polish, and for free.

The guide, a shawl draped over her shoulders, had the tired face of a schoolmistress prepared to repeat a boring lesson about anaerobic respiration, a subject that escapes both her comprehension and
her immediate perception. Her palaver followed a strict rhythm and bothered me as an inopportune fog would have, or rather, a light that was overly bright. Facing a writing desk with mother-of-pearl inlay, I intensified my scrutiny in an attempt to elude her explanations (date of manufacture, provenance) and, leaning forward to observe its delicate iridescence more closely, understood, suddenly, that the owner of that
PALACE
had also tried to free himself from a boring European existence (which must have annoyed him as much as the guide’s aimless blather was irritating me) by surrounding himself with Chinoiseries. There in the left wing of his
PALACE
, he could embark on excursions into the virtual cosmos of a life exempt from fatiguing service to Mother Russia. He had accumulated bronzes and porcelains, spheres of carved openwork marble, carpets showing the crane of wisdom and the tortoise of longevity, as if he were never going to die, which is the illusion of those who exist in the perfect present moment of their knickknacks.

It was an ideal
PALACE
to live in, with minimal distance between my bosom and its magnificence. It made you feel that its owner, the gentleman who loved Japanese lacquers, had gone out for a brief stroll in the garden and would return, from one moment to the next, to the steaming samovar, afternoon
TEA
almost ready. The very fact that the Germans hadn’t occupied it during the war—information provided by the guide—lent it the attraction of goods prudently placed in the vault of a Swiss bank, safe from any danger.

I was incapable of imagining myself
CZAR
of all Russia, lord of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, summering in Petergoff. But the C
HINESE
P
ALACE
could well have been mine, along with a pair of thoroughbreds and its collection of Chinoiseries. To stroll through its rooms was to tighten and pluck the strings of many readings and images that had hung loosely in my thoracic cavity until then. They’d been dangling there for years, occasionally emitting beautiful notes, but the process
by which they were tuned at last culminated in that
PALACE
and left me ready to be played upon by the long fingers of stimuli that were essentially insignificant.

But equivalent, I hasten to clarify. Only years later did I have the money to begin overcoming, little by little, in tiny baby steps, the cosmic distance that separated me from a life such as that one. It was like throwing
things
into an unfathomable abyss—$2 million mansions, fifty-five-meter yachts, holidays in Oceania—never, in any case, to achieve any diminution of the gap. Yet this could cause me no pain. The man who is born owning a golf course never comes to understand the formidable pressure, the truly fundamental value of such a possession. I, in effect, had nothing, absolutely nothing; however, like a bronzed torso in an advertisement, I had
captured the spirit.
To caress the jade of the little statues was to touch the curving limb of the crane in flight, offered by the Zen master but invisible to my blind eyes. Or it was as if the spirit of the owner of the
PALACE
had appeared in the flesh before me to break his walking stick over my shaven head.

I tossed the slippers into their basket, looked out at the garden through the graph of the windowpanes and saw that the sun was shining again over the lake and its ducks. Here was the beautiful backdrop to another mise en scène, the brief appearance of a character who would play an extremely important role in my initiation.

I.
From the far end of the set, emerging from the depths of the park, I saw the white blur of a summer dress approaching. I quickly abandoned the foyer and went into the garden to intercept her at the little duck house. Sixteen or seventeen years old, to judge by her schoolgirl air. She wore a pair of comfortable leather sandals and let me accompany her without giving an instant’s thought to the emptiness of the park, the clumps of shrubbery, the humidity of the hour. Intrepidity, vigor, a walk that placed all her weight on the sole of the foot. By the
time we reached the road that led back to the train station we’d already talked quite a bit and she’d allowed me to run my hand over her hair which was the color of burnished bronze. At that moment, standing there at the crossroads, I discovered that she wasn’t wearing a dress, as I’d thought, but a skirt and blouse in the same color.

Our train departed from N**, only two stops farther in the opposite direction, at 6:35. It would arrive in fifty minutes. In the station restaurant, we asked for mushroom soup and toast. We ignored the kebab platter that, I now realize, cost almost nothing. The soup turned out to be wonderful; there was excellent cooking to be had in Muscovy in those days. Then we spent a long time talking. She showed me a notebook full of writing. She had jotted down the family names of the Italian architects, the cost of the restoration, the time it would take to complete. Minutes before the train arrived, we each paid our own check, a ruble and some kopecks, without the slightest embarrassment. We continued our chat onboard: a marvel of a woman (I’m trying to paint her portrait here). I’d admired the sheen of her hair. We had conversed. It was an experience. We said good-bye without exchanging addresses or arranging to meet again. It would have been a mistake on my part to consider her anything more than a
sign,
easy on the eyes, muse-worthy. I’d succeeded in becoming a lad equipped for something more than reading books.

P
ANIS ORIS INTUS ANIMAE MEAE
(P.O.A.
or
B
READ FOR THE
M
OUTH OF
M
Y
S
OUL
). Yes, I wanted to write a great novel, but one that was based on insignificant feelings, the dot matrix of my existence, the pettiness of consumerism and O
CCIDENTAL
flotsam and jetsam, the indispensable bauble of each new day. I dreamed of repeating the success of those composers of
RADIO
hits who move us to tears with a melody that is cheap and cloying but deeply felt. I yearned to capture an era, that
summer, all that was destined to vanish without leaving a trace, to be forgotten, just as we lost the Philadelphia rhythms of my teenage years. Who would write about that? This was my primordial goal: to freeze the vertiginous shifts in the external attributes of human life, that great immobile organism, inalterable in its gross corpulence, which takes childish delight in transforming its attire, like a mime who, during a single performance, quick-changes between Harlequin, Polichinelle, and Cantonese Mandarin costumes. For that’s what we do: betray the old fashions to make a show or pretense that we are living. Or rather, in fact, to live
precisely
that fatuity. I had decided to return to Saint Petersburg to
live
B
READ FOR THE
M
OUTH
OF MY
S
OUL
, to model my discovery about
frivolity
onto the surface of the real world and study the influence of
FLUORIDE
on a young soul (a Russian soul). That the girl I would finally select played the
FLUTE
fit miraculously into my plan due to the widespread stereotype about Russians and classical music
et cetera.
I’d come up with the title years earlier, a phrase from Saint Augustine’s
Confessions,
PAN DE LA BOCA DE MI ALMA
, which explained the sensation similar to hunger that I felt on seeing certain shades of red. I visualized this inner
MOUTH OF MY SOUL
as a moist purple hole opening crosswise in the region of the solar plexus, ravenous as a baby bird in its nest. To sate it, I had to shovel in all the tactile, visual, and auditory stimuli available: a woman friend’s clean skin, K**’s delicate shoulders and deep anatomical hollows, the perfect design of my fountain pen, T
HELONIOUS’S
vertiginous fingers on B
RILLIANT
C
ORNERS
, that perfect piece of music, warm and pliant.