Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (14 page)

P
ETER
I (
пэтэр
I).
The tyrant indispensible to Muscovy’s enormity. A man of wide-ranging temperament—a Russian—he spent several years as an apprentice carpenter in Zealand, caulking the Russian Navy’s first ships. His indisputable talent earns him the same indulgent treatment as the drunken master craftsmen who plague the I
MPERIUM’S
factories: he’s accepted as an irremediable affliction, “very much our own.” Saint Petersburg, for example, the resplendent Germanic city he founded on the unhealthy and shifting delta of the Neva, стоит на костях (
stoit na kostiah
), that is,
took root upon the bones
of many thousands of Russian muzhiks. Figuratively, of course: but when I heard this terrible accusation for the first time I thought P
ETER
had given the order to fill in the delta’s sandbanks with the corpses of the builders—the technique used by the Ch’in for the Great Wall.

But P
ETER
is credited with an even more horrendous crime: that of having introduced the discordant note of the batiste handkerchief into the simple world of the boyar caftan. For this daring and premeditated attack against the patriarchal order of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, he would never be completely forgiven. A life-size sculpture of him done in wax is on display in the Hermitage: a man of great stature, he rises high on narrow calves,
stoit na kostiah
. He’s dressed in the cosmopolitan garb he brought back from his trip to Europe: the scandalous square-toed Dutch shoes with buckled arches and heels of painted wood (no more of those Asiatic buskins with the tips of the toes curling back!); his skinny tibia clad in stockings, matador-style, held up by a simple garter; close-fitting breeches of blue wool; the bow tie of fine silk; and the brocade frock coat adorned with a double row of buttons (no more of those caftans reaching all the way to the floor!); a sparse beard; a small and impertinent mustache; and, finally, a tricorne (no more of those floppy woolen caps!) atop a wig of powdered curls.

One winter afternoon in 198* I visited the pantheon of the Romanov family in the cathedral that stands within the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress. I was accompanied by T**, a friend, who had insisted on showing me P
ETER’S
sepulchre. Frozen stiff, our hats pulled down on our heads, we approached a group that was receiving the usual litany from a guide’s lips: P
ETER
I, the good
CZAR
who founded a city, distributed land and organized the Russian army . . . When he reached the point of the city built
na kostiah
. . . I, who was hearing the story for the first time, was horrified and sought clarification of this turn of phrase—figurative or literal?—from my friend. Our whispers caught the guide’s attention and he lifted his head (which had been downcast by the useless sacrifice of thousands of Russian souls) and detected ours, with hats on. Then, without preamble or introductory note, like a sports car going from zero to ninety-five kilometers an hour in the span of ten meters, he thrust his
sacerdotal index finger at us: “They haven’t bared their heads before P
ETER
!” and waited for everyone to turn and look before repeating with a hiss: “They haven’t bared their heads before P
ETER
!”

Then he stared at me and proffered from between clenched teeth: “N
ERUS
! What can we expect from a N
ERUS
.” This statement entirely overlooked the fact that P
ETER
I had reigned over an I
MPERIUM
that included millions of N
ERUS
, even as it affirmed the immortality of P
ETER
I, the only surviving
CZAR
.

P
SEUDO
D
EMETRIUS
.
In Russian, for “imposter,” they (we) have the word самозванец,
samozvanets, “
he who gives a name to himself,” a very conceptualist idea, we’d say today. In 1602, P
SEUDO
D
EMETRIUS
revealed himself to the monks of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra as the
CZAREVITCH
Dimitri, son of Ivan the Terrible, believed to have been murdered on Boris Godunov’s orders. He pushed back the hood of his habit, stabbed his index finger at his chest, and gave himself a name. But his “sheep’s eyes” ran in despair across the vast field of his face and the monks expelled him willy-nilly. When the figure of Grigory Otrepyev was no more than a distant point far down the Dnieper river, the prior
SPAT
in rage and baptized him without needing to consult the book of saints:
imposter
.

Neither beard nor mustache grew on Grigory’s face. He was small in stature, disproportionately broad of shoulder, and short of neck. He was, moreover, five years older than the
CZAREVITCH
, who was, in fact, murdered in Uglich. Nor did he suffer from epilepsy, and, as we’ve seen already, he had to struggle grimly against a physiognomy that often betrayed him. The only things that distinguished him were his beautiful
CALLIGRAPHIC
handwriting and his undoubted talent as a con artist, for he had discovered a gold mine, a vacant niche in the pantheon of Russian gods.

Mortal enemy of mirrors, he marches to Poland, where God himself places in his path a beauty, Marina Mniszech, who comes to close the circle: beauty and the beast. (I’ve invented nothing here; this is the most astonishing story I heard in Russia!) While we do not know with certainty how he managed to win her favor, it would appear that she yielded to a promise that overran the narrow limits of a Polish maiden’s imagination: “You shall be empress of Russia.” A truly powerful oath; any woman would have lost her head. (Two centuries later, even Catherine the Great, on the night of the coup d’etat that brought her to the throne—the soft thump of the pillow over the mouth of the sleeping Peter II—paced nervously until dawn. When at last she was informed of the operation’s success, the news would turn out to be somewhat imprecise, for it omitted the corollary that from Peter II’s still-warm body the ethereal copy of an
imposter
had detached itself, as in a Disney cartoon, leapt into the garden, and spurred its steed away: two ghosts, rider and steed, to whom Catherine would never give chase.)

Grigory, the
samozvanets,
embraces the Catholic faith and thus obtains the support of King Sigismund II and the Knights of the Teutonic Order. When he crosses the border into Muscovy, Grigory is weaving, day and night, the delicate fabric of a correspondence composed in his painstaking copyist’s
CALLIGRAPHY
. Epistles that projected over the snows of the north, the forests, and the
STEPPE
, the austere gaze, the lofty brow, the energetic chin of a
CZAR
who, without firing a single blunderbuss, without so much as a clash of spears, entered victoriously into Moscow, the third Rome.

When Gudonov’s
strelitzi
stormed the Kremlin eleven months later, P
SEUDO
D
EMETRIUS
had already drunk deep of the true loveliness of Marina, the beautiful. (I don’t know whether it’s due to this that Polish women even today enjoy an inalterable reputation as great beauties: писаные красавицы.) My sources shed no light on the final destiny
of the woman who was, without the shadow of a doubt, the most beautiful
CZARINA
of Muscovy. (Catherine the Great, née Catherine Anhalt-Zerbst, was a thickset German
frau.
)

On May 16, at dawn, P
SEUDO
D
EMETRIUS
, like a quick-change artist fleeing from a burning theater, flung his
CZAR
mask to the floor and fled in terror down the Kremlin’s long passageways, the redness of his face
in crescendo.
Cornered in a hallway in the north wing, he breaks down the heavy shutters with a kick of his rose-colored buskin and thinks of the contrast between the hard oak boards and Marina Mniszech’s white breasts. Then he jumps—his once unfathomable credit in the coffers of good luck now reduced to zero—and idiotically dislocates his ankle. Forty-eight hours of life remain to him, enough time for him to be chained, burned alive as an example, and have his ashes stuffed into a cannon with an equal measure of gunpowder: the thundering salvo . . . Over the course of the following year, the cloud that emerged from the cannon’s mouth traveled all the way around the globe to precipitate once more, in the summer of 1607, into the human mold of P
SEUDO
D
EMETRIUS
II, atomically identical, the next chapter in the interminable history.

R

R
ADIO
T
ORTURE
.
I’m visiting a friend’s home for the first time. I ring the doorbell (there are many different types of doorbell in the I
MPERIUM
: chirping birds, a concierge’s squawk,
do-re-mi
chimes—any of those). Inside, I’m given a very cordial welcome. There’s talk of a two-week stay, a month if necessary. That night we stay up late conversing and I go to bed dead tired. At six the next morning, an announcer’s thunderous voice brusquely drags me from an apolitical dream and, with my soul in an uneasy state of suspension, I become aware of the successes of the industrial production sector in Western Ukraine followed by various other industrial feats achieved in the region of the Sea of Japan, then hear a summary of the international news followed by a men’s chorus from Georgia. They must have forgotten to turn the
RADIO
off last night, I think. At eight—having missed two hours of much-needed sleep—I am nevertheless tense, ready to form ranks, and fully aware of what is going on in the world.

The pressure exerted by these devices, which are like outposts of the I
MPERIUM
in every home, is so enormous that on the evening of that very day, as we’re drinking
TEA
in the kitchen and talking about Phobos, the Martian moon that has an anomalous orbit, my hostess suddenly turns toward the
RADIO
: “No, I don’t believe there’s life on Mars. Those strange canals don’t prove a thing. It’s so far away, too, though its reddish coloration . . .”—she hesitates a second, then wags a finger at it, “Go ahead, you can put that opinion in my file!” And she flashes a smile for the
RADIO
and for the two of us, a smile that instantly
dissolves into a shudder. Then at last I understand. We’re “wired” like a police informant at a drug deal! An animal terror prevented people from disconnecting those
RADIOS
from the network that extended across the I
MPERIUM
: somewhere, in some remote panel watched by the Ministry of Truth, the red light for apartment five would start to blink.

That
RADIO
was on all day; in despair I tried to move it away from the foreground of my perception and into the deep background, to reduce it to a monotonous whisper, but then I would fall into the trap of the unforeseen silence, abandon my hiding place to look for it, and HA! It would hurl itself at my neck, pecking me with innumerable facts about the life and work of Vissarion Belinsky, the problematics of generational struggle in Turgenev’s
House of the Gentry
. . . and so on
ad infinitum.

The second day, I understood in astonishment that the
RADIO
was meant to be educational, a grandiose enlightenment crusade that haughtily ignored the laws of perception: several full-length lectures followed by two Puccini sonatas rescued from oblivion. I came to think that these
RADIO
programs had always been there in the air, guiding humanity through obscure centuries of ignorance, a notion derived from the joke about Popov, the scientist to whom Russians attribute the invention. When he tuned in his first
RADIO
, Popov was amazed to capture a transmission in the ether. It was Marconi, effusively congratulating him in Italian!

I have no desire to gain knowledge of the five different methods of hand milking practiced in Moldavia nor of the nineteenth-century infant mortality rate in Silesia. I left that house for good after the third day.

R
ASKOLNIKOV
, I
NC
.
Saint Petersburg was still a good city for shuttered courtyards, dark stairways, tenacious drizzle, flooding, and usury. And old women who looked the part. Bent over, they dragged themselves
along the treeless sidewalks, shuffling into hallways, collecting interest. I knew these were women who had survived the nine hundred days of the siege, but when I watched them go past I thought about Lizaveta the idiot, about money and the family heirlooms they may have preserved, wrapped in filthy calico handkerchiefs. Sometimes I would observe one of them as she made her way down the street, following her a short way behind. Suddenly her acute octogenarian ears would pick up the squelch of my shoe in a puddle and she would turn, and since, in her far-distant youth she, too, had read F.M., she would take a long look at the skirts of my overcoat and her eyes would be dry; she was prepared to confront the blow of the
AX
undaunted. In fact, these were all very poor old women but they still had faded
TEA
services or moth-chewed mink coats and hence lived in fear of a robbery.

But Saint Petersburg is still a good city for real usurers and antique dealers with collections of great value. Among the sources of this
ENCYCLOPEDIA
I keep a clipping about the violent death of a collector of antiquities and his elderly female servant. I was seduced by the outline of the story: the elderly lover of Chinese bronzes and his housekeeper, and the thieves who put him to death.

There was enough there for several gangs: the collection was estimated to be worth almost a trillion rubles, or at least several hundred billion, that is, several tens of millions of dollars. An enormous quantity of money, enough to stage a live production of
War and Peace
with wounded Prince Andrei contemplating the sky and Bonaparte reviewing the troops at Austerlitz. The old man had amassed the valuable collection over years of intense smuggling that had brought him all those rubles. He could have organized a cycle of lectures on “How to make a million!” with no fear it would fail to sell out. The millions were in Chinese bronzes and antiques. Beneath tortoises with hieroglyphs on their shells, the whales of crepuscular Saint Petersburg swam, and
above those tortoises stood the elephants of money-changing, the most basic form of usury, and there he was on top, the collector, crowning the whole mess, with the thieves beside him, about to cast him down into the abyss to swim with the whales. The reporter writes that the collection began with the contents of several containers smuggled out of the People’s Republic of China, where the collector had traveled in the 1950s to build a hydroelectric dam.
Several containers.
Very twentieth century indeed. Those were serious calculations, revelatory of the character of an entire period. Sixty or seventy million Russians have died unnatural deaths so far this century: wars, hunger, and the Archipelago. This brings about a certain mental transformation. The man, the late collector, finds himself in China, and China turns out to be a very large country, and he thinks about shipping containers. The R
ASKOLNIKOVS
who planned the robbery were also thinking about millions but not so many. That must have taken them by surprise. They load up with antiques worth many millions of rubles and leave the apartment. Then, after the crime is discovered, while the experts are cautiously making their way through hallways still replete with marble and bronze, the millions keep on disappearing. The
militsia
proceed to seal off the apartment, but the next morning they find the seals broken and several million more rubles of value gone missing. It would have taken four bands of R
ASKOLNIKOVS
to ransack that treasure trove, and four F.M.s to describe the burns inflicted by lit cigarettes (they tortured him but he did not reveal where the cash was hidden) and the many
AX
blows dealt to both victims. There were too many millions there, and this is Saint Petersburg; the reporter makes no mention of any electronic alarm system or bodyguard to protect the antiquarian gentleman, or any policy taken out to insure against robbery (impossible in any case, since the collection was illegal). He describes only the vulnerable apartment, the knock at the door, the collector’s glance out
the peephole, and the tiny face of the elderly housekeeper returning from the market enclosed within it, the gilded frame of thugs who had been following her still invisible.

Do all of you out there understand? From here on, I’m expecting you to lend a bit more credence to what I’m telling you. Saint Petersburg was the right city for carrying out my plan. I’d rented a suite of rooms at the Astoria at a rate of $550 per night and I wanted to see the room F.M. had rented not far from there—I don’t know how much he paid.

R
OMANZAS
.
K** directed her questions through the mouth of her guitar and the succession of arpeggios gave true answers whose authenticity struck deep into the soul. At times, when night was far advanced, she would begin some
ROMANZA
of southern Russia, legs crossed: the wheat fields and the soldier who marches away with his troop. And there before us was a part of the world, a light region of the globe that was a field of undulating wheat and the women at their harvest in their calico shawls, some perfectly nineteenth-century province. K** would sing for hours in her slender thread of a voice, beautiful country
ROMANZAS
, and I would rest my ear against her flowered housecoat to listen as the cascade of
h
s she had stored up in her chest flowed forth. That was how we passed the nights, without electric light, without central heating. Is it true that we were still just the same as we had been for many centuries? To sing a
ROMANZA
and read tomes of Karamzín’s
History
at night was better than switching on the
RADIO
. As we went to sleep, I would invariably say to her “
Que sueñes con los angelitos!”
(“May you dream of little angels!”) which sounded like this in Russian: “
Pust tebe sniatsia angely!
” That certainly merited a
ROMANZA
, and I lost no time composing one.

Russian self-contemplation knows no bounds. When K** launched into one of those beautiful
ROMANZAS
with verses by Esenin, Tsvetaeva,
and even Pushkin himself for lyrics, her eyes would sometimes fill with tears and she would interrupt the song to wonder aloud, “Are there other peoples whose souls are as sensitive, as highly strung and apt to resonate at the slightest breath of wind, as the Russian people?”

I would try to explain. I would pick up the guitar and sing
this
very beautiful song (one of the many that accompanied me throughout those years).

R
UDI
.
The night before our trip to Nice we took a room in one of the Y
ALTA
hotels. At seven, as L
INDA
was dressing for her important stroll along the
CATWALK
(Y
ALTA’S
little seafront promenade would serve the purpose), I dialed
room service,
still a novelty in the Grand Duchy’s hotels. I asked for a bouquet of carnations for L
INDA
and stepped onto the balcony to contemplate the peak of Ai-Petri emerging from the clouds. Then, down below, alongside the garden’s cypresses, I noticed a flower stand that hadn’t registered during our arrival and resolved to go downstairs for the carnations myself.

I.
The florist was listening to one of those horrible Muscovite ballads about scoundrels, pearly tears, apricot cheeks, black plums for eyes. (Each day spent in this country included hefty doses of this sort of vaudeville tune or gypsy dirge—from the Balkans or some such locale. No one turned his nose up at this lowbrow music and since the Russians were all very intelligent they always had a dazzling theory at the ready that could trip up even the cleverest objection; out would come the lecture about the inhuman suffering, the millions reposing in the Gulag. The long periods of time the intelligentsia spent in the work camps had forced them to imitate certain practices, and thus with honeyed voices they sang Гражданин начальник (Citizen Chief), which is how Aleksandr Isayevich (Solzhenitsyn) had once addressed his superior:
Grazhdanin nachalnik,
will you allow me to
make a suggestion? Already holding, hidden in his bosom, the bomb of the
Archipelago
.

Nervous about the many faces from the south I saw there and the possibility of thieves, I put my hand in my pocket and my eyes
SCANNED
fifty meters of street in both directions. An impulse transporting the information that a black form stood off to one side advanced devastatingly along my optic nerve as my fingers probed the soft leather of my wallet, but they were reached by the urgent countersign and remained there, grasping it tightly: someone very cunning was spying on me.

His face was straight off a “wanted” poster, complete with the perpetual struggle against a heavy growth of beard. I concluded that he was one of those picaresque characters from the south who are in the flower business and also dabble in thievery. He understood that I was waiting for him to leave before taking out my wallet and turned indignantly on his very high heels, crossing his arms like the bad guy in an operetta, mumbling insults. My eyes went off in search of some officer of the law to alert, but there was no one under the hotel canopy except the bored bellboy who—anything was possible in the Muscovy—might be in cahoots with the scoundrel from the south.

II.
It was R
UDI
! How could I have taken so long to recognize him? The dark cloud I’d felt pursuing us since our arrival in Crimea took on form and density and acquired a face. I remembered the suggestion he himself had given me that night in the Astoria, his wet lips. “You should go south, to Y
ALTA
. Lots of casinos are opening there. The season has just begun.” He’d mentioned this hotel in Y
ALTA
to me as a trap. R
UDI
realized that I’d recognized him, that his appearance on stage (the incarnation of the Baron de Charlus) had been premature, and that now he could no longer postpone the execution of the plan his carelessness had precipitated. Then he turned to me openly, smiled at me, and sent a signal to the crystalline lens of his eyeballs, which
afforded me a glimpse of the sparkling metallic armature inside, the fearsome machinery.