Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (15 page)

III.
It was R
UDI
! I spun on my heel, with a snap of the coattails of my
frac.
In the harbor, the steamboat that would take us to Nice let out an interminable blast and a band of seagulls suddenly veered out to the open sea. With R
UDI
and four of his men tearing after me, I dashed into the lobby, skating desperately along the polished floor, but at the magical chime of
do-mi-sol
the elevator doors opened and I saw L
INDA
about to step off, one pointy red pump already planted on the lobby floor. I slid another half meter, my face gaping at her, disfigured by a warning of danger I couldn’t manage to voice. L
INDA
stopped short, astonished, and I threw myself inside, grabbing her as I fell, and, yes, did manage to activate the button—R
UDI’S
eye, bloodshot with rage, glimpsed for an instant as the doors smoothly glided shut. Were we safe?

No. The doors reopen to reveal that we’ve landed in a dusty attic, a square of light shining down from a trapdoor, a climb onto the roof our only avenue of escape.

“Curses,” I shout. “We shouldn’t have trusted the
LIFT
!”

S

S
AMOPAL
(самопал). Due to a serious misunderstanding, Russia is reckoned a backward country and newspaper columnists calculate the number of years it lags behind the O
CCIDENT
. However, the I
MPERIUM
was not a country in the strict sense of the word; it was a land surveyor’s polygon full of objects, artifacts, and replicas that were precarious, makeshift: самопал. The enormous grenade that aroused such terror in the O
CCIDENT
was no more than a stage prop, a dummy:
samopal.

Like the imposter who arrives in a beach resort for the wealthy, steps out of a flashy P
ACKARD
, and makes a show of his luxurious suitcases with their reinforced steel corners, Russia, in the assembly of nations, launched little rockets toward the ceiling, melted steel over the white tablecloth, and laid out railway lines from the salad plate to the punch bowl’s ascending slope. Such manipulations provoked confusion and even an unconscious dread, as the prestidigitator of the moment inclined the billiard ball of his head to receive the bedazzled assembly’s applause. (It’s known that after one such function, in Berne, the Indonesian ambassador discovered a rabbit at his feet, chewing the edge of the tablecloth; when he tried to pick it up, its rubbery ears came off in his hand and the mother-of-pearl buttons rolled away, eye sockets empty.)

We lived surrounded by artifacts engineered for only the weakest pressures, mere appearance. In the buildings of the I
MPERIUM
, extremely inconvenient and unreliable
LIFTS
rose and fell,
LIFTS
that may have seemed old but were installed only yesterday. The I
MPERIUM
had
everything it needed for a self-sufficient economy but all of it was shoddy in the extreme: the largest airline in the world, which was also the worst, the largest shoemaking industry and a considerable supply of individuals who might have been mistaken for barefoot Carmelites. It was a papier-mâché Utopia populated by unicorns manufactured in porous resin, light and graceful, but useless—yet in appearance nearly identical to the Japanese model from the last World’s Fair, that could rear on its hind legs and gallop at top speed and would vanish if touched by a female nonvirgin.

The I
MPERIUM
was, in essence, a modern country, but of a parallel modernity, the greatest
installation
in history.
Socialist realism,
so myopically criticized, was in fact the greatest and most important avant-garde movement of the century, but it was a total art that left no gap between itself and reality: a complete model of a universe. Those Occidental artists who fill twenty square meters of the Guggenheim with their “very daring” installations have never dreamed of working on this scale: one-sixth of the planet’s area covered with mobiles,
ready-mades
and urinals, all
samopal
: the Universal Installation.

S
CANNER
.
. . . comme je passais seul devant le casino en rentrant à l’hôtel, j’eus la sensation d’être regardé par quelqu’un qui n’était pas loin de moi. Je tournai la tête et j’aperçus un homme d’une quarantaine d’années, très grand et assez gros, avec des moustaches très noires, et qui, tout en frappant nerveusement son pantalon avec une badine, fixait sur moi des yeux dilatés par l’attention. Il lança sur moi une suprême oeillade à la fois hardie, prudente, rapide et profonde, comme un dernier coup que l’on tire au moment de prendre la fuite, et après avoir regardé tout autour de lui, prenant soudain un air distrait et hautain, par un brusque revirement de toute sa personne il se tourna vers une affiche dans la lecture de laquelle il s’absorba,
en fredonnant un air et en arrangeant la rose mousseuse qui pendait à sa boutonnière . . . Puis rejetant en arrière son chapeau et laissant voir une brosse coupée ras qui admettait cependant de chaque côté d’assez longues ailes de pigeon ondulées, il exhala le souffle bruyant des personnes qui ont non pas trop chaud mais le désir de montrer qu’elles ont trop chaud. J’eus l’idée d’un escroc d’hôtel qui, nous ayant peut-être déjà remarqués les jours précédents [L
INDA
et moi], et préparant quelque mauvais coup, venait de s’apercevoir que je l’avais surpris pendant qu’il m’épiait; pour me donner le change, peut-être cherchait-il seulement par sa nouvelle attitude à exprimer la distraction et le détachement, mais c’était avec une exagération si agressive que son but semblait au moins autant que de dissiper les soupçons que j’avais dû avoir, de venger une humiliation . . .

Or: . . . as I walked alone past the casino toward the hotel I had the feeling that someone was watching me from nearby. I turned my head and perceived a man in his forties, very tall and fairly broad, with a very black mustache, who was lightly tapping his pants with a cane in a nervous gesture and focusing upon me a pair of eyes dilated by attention. He shot me a final glance, at once daring, prudent, fast, and deep, like a last shot fired off before taking flight and then, after surveying the area around himself, adopted a distracted and haughty air and with a sudden spin of his entire body turned to read a theater poster, absorbing himself in this task as he hummed a tune and adjusted the rose in his lapel . . . Then, pushing back his hat, thus exposing a brush cut that was very short but with undulating waves at the sides, he exhaled the sort of noisy sigh that is emitted not by those actually suffering from the heat but by those who wish to appear to be suffering from the heat.

It occurred to me that this might be a hotel burglar who, having noticed [L
INDA
and me], and decided to plot some strike
against us, had just realized I’d caught him unawares as he was spying on me; perhaps he had adopted this new attitude of distraction and indifference merely in order to throw me off track, but his stance was so aggressively exaggerated that his aim, maore than to dissipate any suspicions he may have inspired in me, seemed to be to avenge some humiliation . . .

I.
Allow me to explain. The ease with which, thanks to the
SCANNER
, I was able to reproduce fragments and even whole books from my library on my computer screen, caused my attitude toward them to change. Whether I pulled up some old fragment of my own work or a memorable passage from
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur,
both seemed to emerge from the same nothingness and I came to see the beautiful text, too, as if I’d written it. Thanks to this innovation, the
SCANNER
, the pleasure of reading—
le plaisir du texte—
could be extended to the pleasure of writing and we could go along extracting excerpts from the endless continuum of books and construct a novel out of fragments of Tanizaki’s
Captain Shigemoto’s Mother
or Huysmans’
À Rebours,
or, if it was a matter of depicting a historical scene, a battle scene, a raw recruit’s bewilderment among the deafening salvos, why not simply do a quick search and insert into my own text, word for word, the passage from
La chartreuse de Parme,
when Fabricio del Dongo stands on the bridge watching the dragoons go by: his perplexity? (Which was my own on the afternoon in Y
ALTA
when I ran into R
UDI
, prefigured by that of Marcel when he first observed the Baron de Charlus in Balbec.) Thanks to the
SCANNER
, which transformed the writing of texts into a game, making it
frivolous,
the writer can make use, without a twinge of conscience, of perfect, psychologically precise blocks of text that can even be numbered and cataloged for greater ease and velocity of access. We are freed from the laborious task of memorizing the few
volumes we manage to read during a single lifetime and can make use of whole blocks of language that stand at the ready, entire warehouses of
axes suspended over the victim
(
The Idiot,
F.M.),
adulterous wives
in
shadowy rooms
(a section with a thousand titles) or that same adulterous wife in a
moving carriage
(
Madame Bovary,
Flaubert). To take the thousands of texts in the
BIBLIOSPHERE
and recast them into centos, without having our own authorship placed in any doubt. As Borges—I already mentioned him to you once—would say “
Lo tosco, lo bajamente policial, sería hablar de plagio.
”
(“The crude and ignobly constabulary reaction would be to speak of plagiarism.”)

S
EA
S
IRENS
.
When I noticed an excellent pair of female legs I could never feel certain that some
Ivan
of my acquaintance would see them the same way. At times I was assailed by a vision of a pair of very long, almost perfect legs coming toward me, cutting through the air, precise as a barber’s straight razor. Plunged into a trance by the rhythm of the heels, my eyes fixed on the silhouetted emptiness that, more even than the legs themselves, was those legs, I would hear someone beside me exclaim “Ай, какая русалочка!” (“
Ah, qué sirenita!
” or “Oh, what a little
SIREN
!”) Frankly, hearing those words made me feel even more like a foreigner than Muscovy’s eternal boiled stews! It was a line from a vaudeville show, the reaction of a blind man! The beauty of that woman had an exact physical meaning, and if in some Eastern European language she might be qualified as an “exquisite dish,” in the Spanish I spoke, I would “
hincarle el diente,
” “
partirle el brazo
” (“sink my teeth into her,” “break her arm”)—and painfully.

I.
The unknowable nature of the material world; the closed cycle of cultures that, like trees, rise to the heavens and die, side by side, without ever communicating anything of any importance to each other. This phenomenon came to obsess me in Muscovy, paralyzed as I was
by the hieroglyphs of an alien and indecipherable life (the unfathomable original, there on the open page, that does not cease to trouble us as we read through its translation). For prior to our visit to Java, the imprecise breviaries we consult speak to us of the Javanese as beings very similar to
homo europaeus
. They communicate—we read—by means of sounds that, though guttural, are organized into an intelligible language. Credulous, we enter the verdant grove, book in hand, embark on friendships with one or another of the natives, and discover that we enjoy eating the grilled meat that is typical of the region. And since, indeed, we are able to establish that they, too, are men, that they have wives, that they suffer from deceit and disappointment and are sometimes overcome with hatred, we conclude that they are like us. We live on for two more years among the indigenes without giving the matter much further thought. One day—now more skilled in our use of their language—we come upon divergences in their very fiber, in the mechanisms of their being, divergences so horrific they leave us speechless. Then we rest our gaze upon a warrior: we watch him walk upright on his hind legs, we study his solid torso, his appearance that is, in the end, human, and we understand that the misunderstanding lies precisely there, in his deceptive appearance, because in reality these beings are as distant from us as beasts from another galaxy; they are other, they are not
men.
How could someone truly normal,
human,
exclaim, on seeing a lovely pair of human legs,
Ah, rusalochka ty moya!
I, who came from a planet where we not only spoke another language but also thought in a different way, would register these anomalies, so as to include them eventually in the true chronicle of this world I would one day write.

First refutation: These lyrics from a
guaracha
:
Es una bella mujer / con figura de S
IRENA
/ y su hermosa piel morena / y cabellos largos hasta ahí. / Ay, yo no sé qué voy a hacer, / porque me tiene loco!
(She’s a beauty, that one / body like a S
IREN
/ that pretty chocolate skin /
that hair down to there. / Ay, don’t know what I’m gonna do, / ’ cause she’s got me all wild.)

Second refutation: From
Entretiens sur les sciences secrètes
(vol. I, 1742 edition, p. 27):
Ecoutez donc jusqu’á la fin—
said the Comte de Gabalis—
& sachez que les mers & les fleuves sont habités de même que l’air: las anciens Sages ont nommé Ondiens ou Nymphes, cette espece de Peuples. Ils font peu de mâles, & les femmes y sont en grand nombre; leur beauté est extrême, & les filles des hommes n’ont rien de comparable.

(Hear me out, and learn that the seas and rivers are inhabited, as well as the air. The ancient Sages called this race of people Undines or Nymphs. There are very few males among them but a great number of females; their beauty is extreme, and the daughters of men are not to be compared to them.)

S
OSHA
.
Here’s the story: I left the Jewish girl oozing juice (Henry Miller) and took off over the balcony, the rope ladder.

Before going to Russia, I knew nothing about Jews. I seem to recall that among the heterogeneous and indiscriminate mass of my high school classmates was a girl named Cohen but to be honest, I’d never heard of the Jews as a phenomenon worthy of particular attention. But no sooner had I arrived in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy in 198* than I fell headlong into the milieu of the world conspiracy. Half my professors were Jewish: a great danger. How could this have happened before the very eyes of so many Russians? The rector himself had a suspiciously Polish family name and
. . .
why hide it? He was a Jew through and through: the drooping lower lip, the hooked nose . . . My God, you could see it from a mile away! And what a surprise! That Cohen girl, my former schoolmate (of course she was), and the young geniuses at my Institute and that other violinist whose name . . . whose name
. . .
bah! Jewish, all of them! So by the time I met S
OSHA
(whose name was not S
OSHA
, it’s my feeling of guilt, my retrospective sorrow that christens her with a name borrowed from I. B. Singer: the eternally young, eternally ingenuous heroine), I was well prepared for the sad gazelle eyes, the luxuriant mane of hair, the purple lips of the Hebrew female.